Artist creates pop culture typography posters from handwritten words

The princess to marry
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Many artistic mediums require a great deal of patience and concentration, but the artist Mike Matola shows a whole new level of creative endurance. He creates pop culture posters by hand writing entire scripts and song lyrics to form the pictures. Drawing on positive and negative space, each silhouetted art portrait comes to life, line by line.

Matola’s collection of typographic posters includes handwritten depictions of popular actors, musicians and fictional characters. Freddy Mercury is made up entirely of Queen’s Best of lyrics from the album, while Buttercup and Westley from The princess to marry are made up of words from the entire script of the film. Each piece can take up to 80 hours, showing Matola’s incredible commitment to his art. For a particularly impressive My neighbor Totoro-inspired design, Matola spent 6 months writing the entire script in her native Japanese language.

Matola explains: “The poster was made by sitting down and writing each word with a pen, line by line, along the page and increasing and decreasing the space between letters until the portrait emerges. Similar to a pointillism painting, the handwritten typography blends from afar to create the image. Up close, the viewer can see countless small black ink print spread across the page.

You can see more of Matola’s growing portfolio and purchase its poster designs at Etsy.