This was a cool assignment. For this classwork project, we had to use our speedball carving knife to carve a letter onto the carving pad. I was given the letter “g”, which was told to me that it’s one of the hardest letters to practice on. The way I carved it was by tracing out the letter, and carving everything else that was not needed. The end result was the letter “g” popping out. I was pretty satisfied with my first attempt.

After carving we starting inking the rubber pad and ‘printing’ them on paper. Because the letter g is lower case, and descends at the baseline, it should be a little below the line. But I didn’t realize my mistake until long after many attempts. But soon I got the hang of it. I tried making words with some of the letters my classmates made. Read it and laugh.

I learned plenty from this project. I got a hold of the speedball knife, and how to use its different blades to cut through the pads. I also learned a lot about typography. There lots of different fonts and typefaces that are used in many of the designs we see today, mostly Arial or Helvetica. Now if we’re going to get into details, theres ways to set up the type. I mean kerning, which is adjusting the space between characters, leading, which is the distance between the baselines, and tracking, which is the distance between letters. There is also a lot more to say about baseline, the meanline, the x height and many other things that I’ve learned.