If you’ve been talking to me, either online or in person, there’s a good chance you might have seen something that looks like this:
I’ve decided to name these curious designs “Sigil Glyphs” as I couldn’t really decide between calling them sigils or glyphs. I’m still exploring this concept - I’ve been so busy making them that I can’t even really say what magical intentions are behind them!
Well, for the most part they’re used to represent an idea or entity of some kind. The sigil glyph above is the “Sigil of Inaki”, and is meant to more or less be a personal emblem.
I’ve made a batch for my spirit guides as well. And for the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck. And even just common words.
Okay, but how are these things made? Well, let’s dive into that.
The Wheel of Beginnings
If you’ve ever done your own sigils, chances are you’ve either used or heard of a sigil wheel.
If you haven’t done a sigil using this before, it’s quite simple. The method I learned involves using a phrase, removing all vowels and repeating letters, and then drawing a line that starts with the first letter and hits every letter in order.
For example, if we take the phrase “Hopes and Dreams” we get “H P S N D R M”. Using this method we get:
You can add additional flairs to the line art too, such as dots, other symbols, and more.
This was the foundation for creating sigil glyphs.
Changing Things Up
The sigil glyph method adds a few more layers to this. For example, I’ll typically use all the letters rather than deleting vowels and repeating letters. If a phrase is too long, for example, “Il Mare Etern Nella Mi A Anima”, then I’ll start doing things such as deleting repeating letters and, if need be, vowels.
For this example, let’s use Hopes and Dreams. The phrase (or name, world, or whatever) that I use is called the “source phrase”. Even if it’s altered, I still call it that.
These are best made in some sort of image editing software. Personally, I use GIMP, but whatever you're comfortable with is fine.
So, let’s take the phrase NPSNDRM, and use that. Step one is to draw our lines. But there’s an extra step - we need to connect the first and last letters together. I also put the sigil wheel and lines on separate layers, so it’s easy to get rid of the wheel once the first layer is done. So now, we end up with:
Okay, not bad! Now, we need to add 3 more layers that are exact copies of this first layer. In GIMP this is fairly easy to do. Once we have our four layers, then the magic begins.
We need to flip the 3 layers in different fashions. One needs a horizontal flip:
Then a vertical flip:
And finally, a vertical flip followed by a horizontal flip:
And voila! We have the line art for a sigil glyph done! This is perhaps my most favorite part. It’s really something magical to see a simple phrase transformed into such a cool design.
This is also why I’ll sometimes cut down on the number of letters. More letters means more lines, which can make for some crazy, complex designs - but that also means more that you’ll have to color.
Colors are typically drawn from something associated with the source phrase. For example, the Sigil of Inaki uses colors associated with my spirit guides. This phrase was taken from Toby Fox’s Undertale, so let’s use seven specific colors - if you’ve played the game, you know why: Red, Cyan, Orange, Blue, Purple, Green, and Yellow.
Before you color, you need to merge your line art layers into one. Or, if you’ve gotten rid of the sigil wheel layer, you can save it as a .png and load it up. Either or will work.
Now, we end up with:
I decided to add white as it’s a neutral color and I think it just “works”. Grey was also added, as Boss Monsters in Undertale have a grey soul.
And there you have it!
But there’s a lot more to these sigil glyphs and their design. We’ve just cracked the surface - there’s playing around with the letters in the source phrase, different line designs, where each line begins and ends in each letter’s space, and more. Stuff I haven’t even tried, like all-black cells and different colored line art!
Now over to you - try out your own sigil glyphs! Or even take the Hopes and Dreams sigil glyph and color it in your own way!
You can be sure that you’ll see a lot more of these. Let the magical mystery workings begin.