working with my own fonts to create digital designs for stone, metal and glass

Over the past few months I have worked on a wide range of projects for different materials. As a designer of lettering and imagery I have created true type fonts using my own lettering, which was originally hand drawn and scanned, then converted to bitmaps and digitised. So to cut a long story short I can type out my own lettering.

This enables me to create designs on a computer, experiment with layouts, and thus make designs for other applications and uses, such as for sandblasting, laser cutting, waterjet cutting and CNC in a range of materials, such as glass, stainless steel, MDF as well as stone.

A design for sandblasting in Germany

I often experiment by creating a TEXTure of lettering, which I can then manipulate and digitise to make a single editable ‘path’ as can be seen in the example below, which is a commission for a client in Germany who really liked my lettering and asked me to design an inscription for a memorial to her grandparents. This lettering will be sandblasted by a stonemason in Germany in the local red sandstone. I was given a sketch and the text and this is what I came up with, after some feedback and lots of tweaking. Editing these paths have a way of eating up the hours/days if you are a perfectionist like me, I spent over three days refining these paths and as a purist I always feel the need to have the minimum amount of ‘control points on the curves, for example eight on a ‘0’ creates a purer form.

each of the letters above was created individually and designed to fit the exact space where it sat within the inscription. The design has been send to Germany and I am very excited to see how it turns out.

A Hand carved monolith for a well loved green keeper

This piece was only installed this week. The design was done in a similar way to the previous piece, with some initial input from the client, and tailored to a piece of stone that the family chose.

Here’s the selected stone, Caithness stone from Northern Scotland, which I had to cut down:

Once I had cut the slab down and worked on the sides (there was a need to leave a small raised area for a tiny frog carving) I was able to design the lettering to fit the exact stone as can be seen here:

Then I could transfer the design and get to work. Here are a few images to show the process. I start with a printout and transfer it with carbon paper, then sharpen the chisels and wade in there!

This was a lot of work, Caithness stone is very hard and blunts the chisels quite a bit. Carving the wee frog was a challenge as it is on the end grain, so very brittle and hard. To explain the stone a little, it was designed for a green keeper who was of diminutive stature, and when he retired the shortest hole on the course, the 14th, was named after him – ‘THE WEE MAN’. The significance of the frog was really a nod towards the ongoing nuisance of hundreds of tiny grass frogs on the course. The design of the lettering on the back was an attempt to echo the landscape of the golf course, in a slightly abstract way. Here’s the finished stone:

and installed on the golf course in Sprowston Manor:

My thanks go to the family for their courage in trusting me to make this piece, it was a real pleasure working with them and I hope this will bring them some comfort as they remember Marty. Further thanks go to Clare Anthony for taking some great photos, some of which feature here.

I love the unfiltered way in which children interact with my work.

Artwork for a new church entrance

Another project I worked on recently was for Fakenham Church, where I designed some artwork for the new entrance, again this was done as a digital design with paths this time for sandblasting onto glass doors, and this has recently been installed. So until the next blog post, I’ll leave you with an entrance (well, it is an exit too!).