Remember my friend pillpat (agence eureka) on Flickr, and her countless treasures? Today I want to share another of her stunning alphabets, this time with gorgeous French Cherub Drop Cap Initials:
I have spent countless hours extracting the individual letters, and aligning them so they are as equal as possible in size, and as straight as possible, and then vectorizing them in Illustrator.
The above download folder contains sub folders with the individual letters as JPG, PNG (transparent background) and vectorized SVG-files (that can be resized to any any size you want, you must have advanced photo editing tools to use SVG-files)
Example of individual JPG letter:
Example of JPG-letters used together:
Example of individual PNG letter:
Example of PNG-letters used together:
These files are free for your personal use and enjoyment 🙂
I think these French Cherub Capital Letters would look adorable for Christmas, and with the large sizes you can easily use them for bunting or other crafts that require large sizes 🙂
Wings of Whimsy 
where are the ‘I’ and the ‘W’….?
I’m sorry hunny, but there are no Is and Ws in this particular alphabet 😦
I have seen it in a lot of antique alpabets, where some letters are missing. I think they used the J for both I and J. I believe W is very rare in French, and when used it is pronounced like V. Are there any French people reading this that can enlighten us? Or any typography experts who knows why many antique alphabets have either I or J, but some times not both?
Oui vous avez raison Karita, il manque deux lettres I et W – pourtant nous avons des Isabelle, des Walter et ces deux lettres font partie intégrante de notre Alphabet. Même si Napoléon a connu Waterloo, je suis triste
que les typographes aient oublié volontairement ou non ces deux lettres. Dommage dommage !
Thank you for the input passante.
If anyone does not read French (like me) try google translate and copy-paste the comment there: http://translate.google.com/ 😉
I have seen this on several occasions, also with antique English alphabets. It varies what letters are left out, but I have noticed more often it is the letters J and W. (Not like here where I and W are missing). I really wish I knew why this was done!??
A little bit of googling and (part of the) answer is found on Wikipedia, this is the classical Latin alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Classical_Latin_alphabet
Now, why this particular alphabet has J instead of I, remains puzzling…:-P
These are just gorgeous – thank you so much!
Thank you for the lovely comment, and for taking the time to write me, it is very much appreciated 🙂 xoxoxo
OMG! Beautiful!!
Thank you 🙂 And thank you also for taking the time to leave a comment, midst getting everything ready for Christmas…lol 😀 May it be a Grand one! xoxoxo
Are the beautiful Cherubs and Alphabet free to use on our business site? I’m going to be redoing my website to be more vintage like and would love to be able to use your wonderful art 🙂 . If allowed please let me know. I will also totally credit you on my website! x
I am sorry I will not allow free use of this alphabet on a business site. if you are interested, I can give you an offer on using these, it will not be very expensive, and I can help customize them to your needs 😉 xoxoxo
Ok thank you for replying. I will have to discuss it with my husband. How much would you be offering them for? xo
Dear Stefanie, I sent you a personal email, please check your inbox 😉 xoxoxo
Ok thank you.