Letter with Me - Bibbles
Before we jump into this week’s post, I wanted to say thank you for joining me on this weekly journey thus far while we learn and develop new lettering styles. I’m actually not sure if anyone even reads these (if you do, say hi in the comments!), but I do hope someone’s finding these posts somewhat helpful.
Anywho, I’m about to head back to Taiwan for a month, so the Letter with Me Series will be on a short hiatus. Not sure if I’ll be able to pick it back up immediately upon my return, but it shall be back! OK, now for the actual post …
What a word, bibbles! It reminds me of bubbles and that’s why this week’s challenge is how to make your words look bubbly in all sorts of ways. We’ll be adding in styles we’ve been practicing throughout the weeks we’ve been lettering together!
And just in case you’re wondering, bibbles means to eat and/or drink noisily. That’s definitely a pet peeve of mine, but this word is too cute to dislike.
Sketch phase
As with any practice, we start with sketching out some ideas. I like to write out the word first in different styles (e.g., lower case letters, upper case, a mixture). Definitely use the word to inspire you.
All the B’s make everything feel bubbly and rounded. If you think about it, there are very few angles in this word, so lean into it. Even if it doesn’t quite look like the letter, that’s ok! My last version has my B’s looking like 8’s!
Refine Phase
As we go to refine our letters and give them even more style, we can consider what makes things feel bubble-y.
Bubbles are spherical, so making your letters 3D like we practiced last week is a good way to get the bubbliness across. Just make sure everything is rounded, even the straight parts of the i and l.
Bubbles tend to lead me to think of liquids, so my next version, I tried to give it a liquid feel. No defined edges, things kind of blending all together in each letter. If you want to take it a step further, you can add some dribble/drops on the bottom of the letters to make the fluid illusion feel even stronger.
For the third version, I originally wanted to letter the word in a circle since bubbles are circles essentially. But the word is too long for a circle, so I went with a long oval-ish shape. And made the word itself look like water drops on the surface of a veeeeery elongated bubble.
Let me just say, trying to give descriptive names to these styles is really hard.
For the fourth version I wanted to do a graffiti-ish style. I see a lot of these kinds of bubble letters spray painted on the sides of train cars here. I also notice that a lot of graffiti lettering has letters on top of one another rather than separated. I wonder why that is.
The fifth version, I just went all out and did whatever made sense in my brain. Originally I had the B’s and O’s not have their center circle so they were truly like bubbles. But I don’t know. It felt weird to me to not have the centers so I added them in. But now they look like donuts! Or number 8’s. But out of all the styles, I think this one is my favorite. May have to use it in a future lettering piece!
And the last image is with the different versions all together. I added bubble doodles in to make the bubble feel even more obvious (if it wasn’t already enough). Heh.
Final Thoughts
As always with the Letter with Me challenge, it’s all about discovering new and/or developing your own lettering styles within a constraint. I am a firm believer that constraints breed creativity. We focused on bubble letters this week, and as you can see, there are so many different ways you can create bubble letters! And I didn’t even do any script styles!
So, have fun playing around with the word and the general bubble (how many times have I written this word by now) letter style. It is truly one of the funnest styles, in my opinion anyway. Don’t worry about having them look exactly like bubbles. And don’t spend too much time perfecting each word. We’re exploring and building our lettering style bank, so let your hand lead the way and don’t overthink too much!
And don’t forget to show me your bubbles!