Letters

It was important to me, that the three letters we needed in Twelfth Night at Oak Park Festival be distinguishable from each other. 

The first, a fake love letter, was printed on this cloud and rainbow paper I had leftover from another project. 

The paper was not wild, but just unique and silly enough to make it distinctive (and recognizable the next time it appeared). The text was printed on the plain back side so that the interesting side was more visible to the audience while the actor was reading it.

I decided the second letter would be written on a cocktail napkin. As opposed to tearing napkins and writing that same note over and over I printed out the copies of the note on thin printer paper, 

 Then I cut them out and used modge podge to attach them to the napkins. 

They were still floppy like napkins, but sturdy enough to hold up while being a bit abused during a humid outdoor performance. 

The third letter was printed on a sheets of yellow legal tablet paper. 

Did you know that you can carefully tear a sheet off of one of these pads along the top perforations, and feed it directly through a printer?

You can!

The girl at the print shop at Office Max was super surprised

And if you use a handwriting font (I usually download them from dafont.com), it looks authentically handwritten even very close up. 

Construction paper cut-out letters

For the Winter Wonderettes at Fox Valley Rep, I needed to make lots of holiday decorations that looked homemade, but still looked high quality, like they were made with care. One of the trickiest things to figure out was the lettering on all the signs I needed. In the past I would have stenciled onto construction paper or poster-board and then cutout the letters, but in this case I wanted more of a variety of fonts and more control of the font size than I could get with the stencils I owned. 

 Instead I decided to create documents with the exact fonts I needed in the exact size.

 I glued them face down onto pieces of construction paper

 It was still easy to see the outline of the dark letters through the thin printer paper

So I was able to easily cut out the letters.

And then peel the printed letter off the back

 I was left with construction paper cutout letters that looked consistent and carefully made, but still home crafted.

Cyrano Letters

These letters were created for Cyrano. Since they are the central piece of the show we needed to make them distinctive and special. 

 

I started with a nice parchment paper. I used a copper color for Cyrano's letters. 

To differentiate Roxanne's letters, I used a silvery blue parchment. 

I had an assistant on the show who actually was the one who chose the fonts and typed the letters. To get the fonts I sent her to dafont.com, one of a number of websites available to download free fonts online. It's worth checking the whole thing out if you never have, but for this project specifically we used the section of handwriting fonts. The fonts on the site are much more natural looking than any that you likely have pre-loaded on your computer and using them is considerably easier and more consistent than doing it by hand and copying. The fonts are very easy to download and install, the site even has a step-by-step list of instructions if you need help.

 After seeing the letters in tech rehearsals I felt that the parchment didn't make the letters feel special enough. To help give them some definition I outlined the copper letters with a touch of bronze paint and a touch of silver to the silver letters. It's not visible from the audience, but it defines the letters a bit, and helps the edges not feel as new and modern and sharp.

 One letter needed to be soaked with blood (I don't feel bad revealing this because the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac is pretty much common knowledge). To stain the letter I used a mixture of red and blue food dye diluted with a very little bit of water. This picture is with one coat of very wet dye.

And this final picture is with a second coat of dye and the bronze painted edge.