Lettering is hard to do by hand, but coloring-in outlines of letters is easy, relaxing and  fun.

See how we blended modern technology and old-style handwork to get just the right mix of creative fun and quality.

We wanted to decorate our new-born baby’s room with some kid-style graphics. Of course Daddy wanted to do it himself, but he didn’t want to suffer in the process. Building-block-style lettering came to mind, but Daddy balked at drawing the outlines of the letters, because that is hard!

Now our newborn’s name isn’t Aethers, but if you’re good with anagrams, you might figure it out. Here are the letters we ended up creating:

Here are close-ups of the letters, surrounded by baby:

We used software to create the outlines of the letters, then used our favorite markers to do the coloring inside. Perfect letter outlines on the outside, free-flowing creative ink on the inside!

If you’re a graphic artist, you probably have fancy software like Adobe Illustrator that can make letter outlines in no time. But for the rest of us who have only office-oriented software at our disposal, the process is a bit trickier, but not impossible.

Here’s how we did it. Maybe you can use a similar technique for your own projects, or to give your young ‘uns something to do on a rainy afternoon.

Pick a Font Family

First, we experimented with font styles. We fired up Word 2010 and created a sample set of letters, then changed the font for a few copies of the set.

Fatter fonts are more fun to color in, so the last two looked good.

We went with Cooper Black. It looks very wood-blockish, don’t you think? I think we’ll save Showcard Gothic for future Hallowe’en projects!

Outlines via Text Effects

We used Word 2010′s Text Effects in the Font group of the Home tab to convert our text to outline. Older versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint have had Word Art for years and years. The process for getting outlines will be slightly different, but you should be able to get nice outlines using Word Art if you don’t have Office 2010.

Here we picked the most “outline-ish” effect we could find:

But it still had the wrong color and a shadowy effect that we didn’t want.

Using the drop-down options beneath Text Effects, we were able to remove the shadow via Shadow > No Shadow. Pretty straightforward, if you ask me!

The blue outline had to go. We wanted nice, juicy black outlines:

Thank you MS Word for the nice outlines. Now we just need big, plump letters to print out for coloring!

This was as simple as increasing the font size, as you normally would in Word. In Word Art, you probably have to do it in a special Word Art dialog box, but it’s a no-brainer either way:

You can also up the lineweight. Not only does the final result looks better, it makes coloring within the lines a heck of a lot easier!

Now just make ‘em real big. Don’t be shy, 400 or 600 points, even! Then add page breaks between each letter so that you get one per page, and send it all off to the printer!