How to Do Bubble Letters

Write your word across the page in plain block capitals, the way you would print a label. Keep the strokes thin and the pressure light. Leave a wide gap between the letters, wider than feels right, because every one of them is about to gain a fat rounded outline that eats into the space on both sides.

ART is a good first word. Three letters, three different shapes to practice on, and short enough that you can start over without much loss. Anything under five letters works.

Start at the bottom of the first letter and draw one continuous curvy line all the way around the outside of it, the way you would draw a cloud. Follow the shape of the letter but round off every corner and let the line bulge a little between the corners. Bring it back to where you started and close it up.

Any letter with a hole in it needs a second small curvy shape inside. The A has a triangle, the R has a loop. Draw those the same way, rounded and slightly swollen, then move on to the next letter.

Rub out every printed line trapped inside the curvy outlines and leave the outlines alone. The thin skeleton disappears and what is left is a row of fat rounded bubble letters spelling the same word.

This is the payoff, and it is the reason the printing had to stay light. Press hard at step one and you are left with a grey ghost inside each bubble that no amount of erasing will lift, and it shows through the color later.

Pick one side of every letter, the right for example, and run a broken line of short dashes just inside the outline. Use the same side on all the letters so the light reads as coming from one place.

Now go to the opposite side. Draw a second line a short way in from the edge, then fill the narrow channel between that line and the outline in solid black. The dashes read as a highlight, the filled band reads as a cast shadow, and between them the letter lifts off the page.

Treat the whole word as one shape and trace a curvy line right around the outside of it, dipping into the gaps between letters wherever there is room. Go around a second time a little wider, then fill the band between the two lines in solid black. That heavy border is what makes the word read from across a room.

Fill the empty corners with four point sparkles and small hearts. Then draw a small cloud shape near the top of each letter and leave it white, so the bubbles look shiny the way a balloon does.

The board version was the rehearsal. Redraw the same design on white paper in light pencil, then trace every line with a black Sharpie. Give the ink a minute to dry and erase any pencil still showing through the outlines.

Ink goes on before color, not after. Sharpie will not smear once it is dry, so a crayon can run right over the outlines without dragging black across the paper.

Split the crayons into warm colors and cool colors and give the letters one family, the background the other. The video runs yellow across the top of each letter, into orange through the middle, and red at the bottom, so the value gets darker as it drops.

Press hard enough that the wax sits solid with no paper showing through. Color around the little cloud shape and leave it white, or the shine disappears under the first layer.

Fill the background with the cool family, working outward from the word. Light green sits closest to the letters, then blue, then purple at the edges. The radiating guide lines split the background into wedges, which makes it easy to see where each color should land.

Turn the paper as you go so every crayon stroke points away from the word. Strokes running outward make the color look like it is exploding off the letters. Strokes running up and down flatten the whole thing out.