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Happy Letterer Appreciation Day!

2017 Letterer Appreciation Day by Nate Piekos

I had plans to reprint a column I wrote a few years back. I can’t find the JPEGs for it. So much for Plan A!

In the meantime, today’s Pipeline Vlog covers much of the same ground.

Every creator has to solve a thousand problems for every page they do.  A blank page — or a blank layer in Illustrator — is a seriously scary thing. In this video, I’m looking at two panels from “Uncanny X-Men” and thinking about all the decisions Tom Orzechowski had to make just for those two panels.

He’s a pro.  I’m sure he didn’t think that much about it. A lot of it came naturally to him from his previous experience.  He’s also fortunate that he was working with an artist, John Byrne, who left blank space at the top of his panels to include the word balloon.  That helps….  As wordy as Chris Claremont’s scripts could be (from a letterer’s point of view), there was usually space on the page to put it all.

So here I am, with a look at some of the things you might not think about when you think about a letterer’s job.

 


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