Hand drawing a spiral

Creating spiral is easy using Illustrator or finding templates online. In this tutorial, I wanted to show how to hand draw a spiral for those days when you’re without modern technology. For me, this happens when I’m flying or traveling without a laptop.

The basic tools I need are:

• Drawing compass (you can also draw by hand if you’re really good with make circles)
• Hard pencil
• .01 micron pen or similar (super fine tip)
• graph paper: I really like 10×10 gridded paper like Bienfang or Borden & Riley
• tracing paper
• eraser will be useful too

Step 1: draw a center point with a line down the center horizontally and vertically and diagonally. I draw a square around to create a border.

Step 2: Create a starting point and height of your text. For this example, I chose letter height (twice x-height) at 2 grid boxes spacing them with 6 grid boxes in between. (There’s a reason why I chose this specific number)

Step 3: Create a circle at the top and bottom of each letter height you drew. I find this help when I end up writing and sometimes my x-height gets wonky when I’m not paying attention.

The reason I mark a diagonal line is to create 45deg markings. From 0deg to 45deg, you’ll see, I drop the letter height by 1 grid. I then redraw the circle to meet up at every 45deg marking, constantly dropping by 1 grid.

You’re wondering, why did you make me draw a circle everywhere??? The circle actually helps guide my hand drawn lines by giving me a point of reference as I try to reach my next marking.

Step 4: You’ll see at 45deg marking, the spiral starts to close in. Because there’s 8 sets of 45deg in a circle, and you have to drop by 1 grid, by the time you reach 0deg, the top of the letter is 8 grid down, thus the reason why I wrote 6 grid between each letter with a letter height of 2 grid.

Step 5: Finish the spiral!

Step 6: Transfer the grid to a tracing paper so that when you’re writing, the grid won’t distract you.

I kept the horizontal/vertical and diagonal lines because they become my slant guide therefore, my text doesn’t fall over which is typically when you’re writing in a circle line.

Here’s a circle! Try it out and let me know what you guys get!