stevebuk
Established Member
Scroll saw fonts.
From time to time and over several years I have sat down at the computer on the odd occasion with the sole purpose of looking for scroll saw fonts and in all that time I have only found two and one of those is not very good.
The other day I was having a chat with Sheila Landry and she went to great lengths explaining the difficulty in creating a font just for scroll saw work. It is especially difficult when you want to use a font inside of the wood.
One font I really liked that I thought would lend itself perfectly to name signs was a real pig. It meant printing each letter out individually and gluing it to the wood and hoping that I would get each one perfectly straight but when you make the number of name signs that I do it is not viable to do it this way.
When making a name sign where the letters stand on a plinth there is no real problem, almost any font can be used and in this case I quite like the Hobo font. I was playing about again with fonts the other evening and found one that needed very little work on it to make it suitable for scroll saw work where you are cutting a name from inside the wood, it’s called Monrovia Corsiva and can be found in most word processing software.
The letters that give the most problems are A, B, D, O, P etc. You have to cut them so the middle bits remain intact. I have enclosed a photo of three names I did quickly to see how they would turn out. Having a huge pile of Sapele I used this wood for the experiment and I am pleased with the way they came out. I should have used a lighter wood really but you can see how well the Monrovia Corsiva font lends itself to scroll saw work.
I use a laser printer for all my patterns so everything is in black so when I printed off the patterns I sat down with a fine tip red pen and marked the areas where I did not want to cut and found the whole exercise quite easy to do, you just need to spend some time looking at it first and at all the letters and then decide what bits you are going to leave behind.
I have also enclosed another photo of a plaque I made the other day. It is one of Sheila’s designs and you can see how beautiful the font is that she has used, no doubt she spent many hours perfecting it and I must admit that I found cutting this plaque quite challenging.
From time to time and over several years I have sat down at the computer on the odd occasion with the sole purpose of looking for scroll saw fonts and in all that time I have only found two and one of those is not very good.
The other day I was having a chat with Sheila Landry and she went to great lengths explaining the difficulty in creating a font just for scroll saw work. It is especially difficult when you want to use a font inside of the wood.
One font I really liked that I thought would lend itself perfectly to name signs was a real pig. It meant printing each letter out individually and gluing it to the wood and hoping that I would get each one perfectly straight but when you make the number of name signs that I do it is not viable to do it this way.
When making a name sign where the letters stand on a plinth there is no real problem, almost any font can be used and in this case I quite like the Hobo font. I was playing about again with fonts the other evening and found one that needed very little work on it to make it suitable for scroll saw work where you are cutting a name from inside the wood, it’s called Monrovia Corsiva and can be found in most word processing software.
The letters that give the most problems are A, B, D, O, P etc. You have to cut them so the middle bits remain intact. I have enclosed a photo of three names I did quickly to see how they would turn out. Having a huge pile of Sapele I used this wood for the experiment and I am pleased with the way they came out. I should have used a lighter wood really but you can see how well the Monrovia Corsiva font lends itself to scroll saw work.
I use a laser printer for all my patterns so everything is in black so when I printed off the patterns I sat down with a fine tip red pen and marked the areas where I did not want to cut and found the whole exercise quite easy to do, you just need to spend some time looking at it first and at all the letters and then decide what bits you are going to leave behind.
I have also enclosed another photo of a plaque I made the other day. It is one of Sheila’s designs and you can see how beautiful the font is that she has used, no doubt she spent many hours perfecting it and I must admit that I found cutting this plaque quite challenging.
