Lettering Style
Saladino's default dialoguing style is curvy and naturally enmeshed with the artwork. His trademark is his big, bold exclamation marks, which he adopts for "effect. . . . They got attention and sales at the newsstand." Saladino always letters by hand, even in the era of computers, which he never uses. Likewise, his word balloons are done freehand, never with a template.
Whereas previous DC designer Ira Schnapp's house advertisements were known for their large blocks of stately text, Saladino's house ads employed the principle of "five words or less," with the words heavily stylized and frequent use of the exclamation point.
Gaspar used a sandblock to grind down and sharpen his pen nibs. The "Gaspar Stone," as it was known around comics circles, was an inch wide by three inches long, and consisted of several layers of sand-strip. "After the top piece wore out, you’d just peel it off and use the piece underneath."
Read more about this topic: Gaspar Saladino
Famous quotes containing the words lettering and/or style:
“the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)