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Calligraphy Calling

How Chaiwat Sriwilard turned his passion into a day job.

Adobe Fresco: Painting Studio

Sketch, Draw and Paint Artwork

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Name: Chaiwat Sriwilard (aka Nine)
Talent: Calligraphy
Creating since: 2015
Tools: Adobe Fresco, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil

Bright colours, artistic lettering, beautiful backgrounds. In the hands of Thai calligrapher Chaiwat Sriwilard, even the simplest of words is exciting to read.

His aim is to convey more emotion in written messages and bring happiness to those who read them, a passion he first discovered when he started at art school and was trying to distinguish himself from his peers: “There were so many gifted drawers at art school. I couldn’t compete with them, so I tried to find my own way and discovered that calligraphy was my thing,” he explains.

Calligraphy focuses on the overall aesthetic, while typography is about a repeating system of letters.

After graduating, Chaiwat found himself employed as an art director at a creative agency, but decided he didn’t want to let go of his favourite medium and continued work on calligraphic commissions for clients in his spare time.

As his commissions increased, he decided to turn his passion into his new day job and quit his role at the agency. Chaiwat launched his own brand, Typer, and now focuses solely on commissions and running calligraphy workshops.

Don’t compare your first lesson to another’s 28th.

—Chaiwat Sriwilard

To create his dazzling designs, Chaiwat uses Adobe Fresco with his iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and he finds it enables him to draw more intricately than if he were using real-life brushes and pens on paper. Precision and dedication are key, and Chaiwat can sometimes spend days practising line after line, perfecting each stroke.

Here are Chaiwat’s top three tips for using Adobe Fresco:

  1. Use Touch Shortcuts. These help you switch between a brush and an eraser quickly, and trim the lines that may not have gone to plan.
  2. Draw it as a vector. This means you can scale your drawing in any size without the worry that it will look pixelated.
  3. Make multicoloured lines. Paint a few swatches of colour next to each other, then tap the Eyedropper tool and move it around until you see a multicolour swatch. Start painting to draw a line that looks like a rainbow.

Keen to start your calligraphic journey? Download Adobe Fresco and put these expert tips to use. And remember: there’s no shortcut when it comes to mastering calligraphy.

“I meet lots of people [at my workshops]. Some are hard on themselves because they feel they aren’t as good as the person sitting next to them,” Chaiwat explains. His advice for beginners? “Don’t compare your first lesson to another’s 28th.”