Do you mean you're drawing the letters on paper or drawing them digitally and creating a font that you can use on the computer?

And what are the fonts you have found? Are these on your machine? Or printed specimens?

And what are you doing with the resulting typefaces? If you're selling someone else's design without acknowledgement that's not good.

And are you copying faithfully or interpreting/extrapolating from the source designs?

I think another important question would be this: are you planning to sell any of this artwork?

It also depends what sort typefaces. For example, copying a digital font of old woodtype which has itself been copied from an old Dover book is, to me, different from copying a very unique display face which was recently designed specifically as a digital font.

Hi:) thanks for all your responses. I am drawing on paper with a fine ink pen and creating something new from them. They are old fonts i have found printed on things, old newspapers and packaging, mostly decorative ones. I am not copying faithfully, i am changing and adding lots to these. As of now i have not sold any, but a few people have asked me recently if they could buy them so that is why i wanted to check first.

Hm, so people want to buy your drawings, or do you want to make them into computer fonts?

Legally I think you're not in trouble either way as long as you're not fiddling with someone else's font program. Ethically I'd definitely want to be acknowledging the sources and adding a lot of interpretive touches.

No this has absolutely nothing to do with a computer, the drawings are completely done by hand and so much is added and taken away from the original lettering I have found. I have asked a lot of people but no one really knows the answer.
I don't know a thing about creating a font from scratch, do people not take inspiration from other fonts when creating new ones? Thanks so much for your input, I really appreciate it:)

I don’t think it’s a problem:
http://typophile.com/node/81407

Sounds like you're fine then. Legality only becomes a concern when you're making fonts...sounds like you're lettering rather than fontmaking.

Oh what's the difference between lettering and font making?? :D

A font is a program that renders a typeface (design) on a computer; lettering is when words are created individually by hand.

Ah i see! Thanks so much for your help:D

Lettering can be handmade OR produced on a computer. The real difference is that a piece of lettering is produced as a one off solution to a specific problem, whereas a font is made to work as well as possible in a large number of unknown applications.

Ha, I knew I'd be somehow a bit wrong. That's a better way of explaining it. :)