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Hey i am trying to pen tool this sketch correctly but cant seem to make my curves look proper. What is the best way for me to pen tool this sketch in Illustrator ?? Your help or advice would be highly appreciated.

Bryan Heimowski
Bryanheimowski.com

 

According my experience I did learn some tricks about blackletter legibility, because this kind of style tend to merge its strokes with other gliphs or loose their parts making a hard work to reach read it and sometimes we need to keep the look closer to original pattern to solve such troubles, e.g. The word "Big" the base of /i/ need to be oblique falling to forward (as classic) or it will looks like an /L/ this will be highlighted if dot above keep appoint to stem or as shorter stroke (closer to a simple dot).

In word "Smoke" (it's fun but I have had hard to reach to read this) at first look I saw a letter /p/ instead /m/ and a /R/ instead /K/ well you might try to draw the first stroke of /m/ shorter and again the base last stroke keep oblique falling-forward as /i/ for /K/ and according the original tradition of this gliphs construction the ascendant used to be appoint forward too covering the rest below itself as roof so you can make diferent from /R/.

Try to make this simplest, control the curviness at base of stems, many times this kind of decorations looks well but we need to be sure about this kind of extra shapes don't will change the main structure of our finished letters, the best way to know wich one its better choice is draw and redraw as many as you can and test the readability asking another person (prefer somebody that don't know what's the logo said before his or her read it).

Hope this little advice be helpful to you.
Cheers