Nuggetty Goodness

I love calligraphic cards, posters, and logos. My handwriting's pretty bad though, so I've always ended up looking enviously at the work of those designers who can do such things, and wishing that my feeble attempts would turn out as well.

Enter Livebrush, the cheat's way of creating beautiful, hand-drawn, flowing calligraphic text.

While I don't think Livebrush was actually made for this purpose, it is *amazing* at it.

Me of the horrible scribbly writing came up with these bits of 'calligraphy' just by using a Wacom tablet, and the settings I've shown above.

Oh, and Livebrush is available both as a free, and as a commercial (but cheap!) version.

If you've ever drooled enviously over the work of leet calligraphers, go and play with Livebrush. Do eet nao.

Livebrush is interesting for a couple of reasons, not least among them that it seems to present a more intuitive and fluid way to work with vector brushwork than Illustrator.

Takes a bit of getting used to, though, because what dictates the width/strength of the lines isn't pressure, but speed. The faster I move my brush, the fatter the lines I get.

That being said, I am a total nub at this, so it's entirely possible that there's a way to adjust so that the lines respond to pressure, and not speed.

The program itself seems pretty nice in terms of responsiveness, and the kinds of lines that are generated. Especially nice is that for just US$10, I'll have the option to export the entire thing as vector shapes.

I'll probably play with this some more on my upcoming holiday.

I also find it interesting how adapting to / learning this new tool has resulted in something quite far (I think) from my usual linework... Omm!