Shadow Type

Shadow Type greta gillen

the photos

For our first project, the assignment was to create original letterforms from pictures of your body creating a shadow. I chose my last name, Gillen, and decided to make all of my letters uppercase, except for the N. Letters like the I and the L were easy and obvious to create, but the letter G proved to be much more of a challenge. In the end, the G is my favorite of all the letters. After the pictures were taken, I printed them out, and traced them to create my first sketch.

the sketches The first draft, on the top left, was traced driectly from the compiled photographs. In this version, it is very easy to tell that the letterforms came from sihlouettes. In my second draft, I tried to make the letters a bit more abstract, and more smooth. The result lacked character, and did not have the expressiveness of the first one. So I went back, adjusted spacing between the letters, and found a good middle ground for the third draft. I did one more to make the finishing touches, and the result is a balance between the smooth and abstracted draft, and the expressive shapes from the photographs.

The final inking, below, is abstracted enough so that the body parts are not as clearly visible as they were at first. I kept the curved lines and bumps that make it look unique. All of the letter forms, excluding the I, have a huge weight on one side, and a lighter stroke on the other.

the anatomy

The next part of the project was to take the completed piece and make it into a typographic chart, labeling the anatomy of the letters. I researched different type charts, and looked in my notec in order to correctly label my own type chart. The charts I was inspired by are pictured on the left, and a thumbnail sketch of what my own chart would look like is pictured below.

the final

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