Alphabet Building

While writing my first novel, I decided to create an alphabet for one of my alien races. This was inspired mainly by the Elvish language that Tolkien wrote. Tolkien created the alphabet, both written and spoken, two different dialects AND rules for conjugating and all of those lovely things when writing Elvish words in English.

I did not go to that much trouble. I just took the English alphabet, with its 26 characters, threw in a few characters like "CH", "TH", "SH" and separate characters for "Y"as a consonant and a vowel. That gave me thirty letters. Then I drew some cool looking symbols. The problem arose when it came time to insert some of my alphabet in my book. I couldn't exactly draw it in there unless I printed it first.

There's a program called GIMP that does almost everything photoshop can, but it's free. However, it's a little tricky to get used to. I used GIMP to make all of my alphabet. It took a lot of time, but it turned out great. Here's an example:

http://bsmeyersauthor.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/example.png

What do you think? (I'd tell you what it says, but if you remember, I'm really paranoid. I'll just tell you that it is a real word.)

I created my second alphabet a few weeks ago. It also has thirty characters, but it was a lot more complex. It is made up of a series of circles, triangles and squares that follow a pattern and it's pretty cool! I'm not showing you that though, it's my favorite!

A few days ago I drew eleven very basic alphabets for another project I'm working on. Only two of them have been digitized using GIMP though. I'm currently working on a twelfth alphabet for that project. It's my hardest yet! It has forty characters and has been a pain to digitize. I have ten left to digitize. I really like where it's going!

If you're not already following the work of Aubrey Hansen (@aubrey_hansen) you should go check out her blog! If you have been following her work stayed tuned because I've inspired her to create an alphabet herself!

(Original Post on July 15, 2011 at: http://dft.ba/-BSMeyers82 )