Hand and Brush Lettering for Beginners: Tools to Embrace Your Own Style

1. Hand and Brush Lettering for Beginners Tools to Embrace Your Own Style : I am going to teach you all about brush and hand-lettering. Throughout this class, I'm going to break down what you need to get started to make your own unique and beautiful hand and brush lettered pieces. How do I know how to do that? Well, have you ever had someone tell you that you can't do something that you haven't been good enough and that just pushes you a little bit further to prove them wrong? That's my story with hand and brush lettering. [MUSIC] I used to be a workshop captain at aircraft store and I applied to be a handwriting teacher for our store. I was told that my handwriting didn't look good enough because it didn't look like a font. I was devastated as someone who knows the power of the words that we use, I want to be able to create lettering pieces that inspire others, and to be told that I couldn't teach that gift to someone else, it broke my heart. I became obsessed with practicing my hand and brush lettering skills to the point where I became an artist. I've designed hand-lettered pieces for weddings, for commissioned artwork, I do tutorials for Peggy Dean and The Pigeon Letter Design Team and now I am finally sharing all my inside tips and tricks with you. [MUSIC] This is the beginner class but it's for anyone who is wanting to learn how to embrace their own lettering style. It's for anyone who wants to start incorporating hand lettering into their artwork or learn how to make thoughtful gifts for their friends or family. You'll learn how to draw guidelines so you can letter on practically anything. Most importantly, we're going to have some time to connect and remind ourselves that creating is for joy. I hope you'll join me here on my new class on Skillshare, hand and brush lettering for beginners, tools to embrace your own style. I'm going to be walking you through how to make a quote card, as well as how you can easily turn watercolor paper into a greeting card. Plus you also get a downloadable workbook, where you'll be able to practice writing your letters again and again. [MUSIC] I can't wait to see you in class. 2. Class Project: We're be making two projects today. We're going to be hand-lettering one piece and then we're going to be brushed lettering the other. Intention here is just for you to make something thoughtful, to show someone how much do you care about them. Let's spread some joy. This also gives us a chance to talk about the two types of watercolor techniques that there are. [MUSIC] It looks like when the colors mix. I'm going to show you how easy it is to recreate those cursive, bubbly letters with your hand or your brush lettering. There are some rules on how to size your letters, and figure out spacing, and I'm going to go through all of them with you. We just have to remind ourselves that this is fun and that we're learning the rules so we can break the rules and make our own original pieces and spread some joy and happiness. [MUSIC] Be making two projects today. We're going to be hand-lettering one piece and then we're going to be brush lettering the other. Let's grab our supplies. We're going to be making. 3. Basic Supplies for Hand Lettered Gifts: Let's grab our supplies. We're going to be making two projects today. Grab a 9 by 12 piece of watercolor paper. Size 2 round brush, pencil, ruler, a bone folder, eraser, a waterproof and archival pen, some watercolor, a paper cutter, water, and a towel. Because we're going over the basics today, these are the beginner tools that you need to get started. We're going to prep our paper. 4. How to Size Watercolor Paper for a Card or Artwork: We have a 9 by 12 piece of paper. Because I know this is already 12 inches in length, now I'm going to make a 4 by 6 card. That's a standard note card size. I'm measuring to the four-inch mark, which is cutting all the way up. Then we have 12 inches by four inches and we need to mark the center. We know where to put our fold. We're just going to make a small little line right here. You'll be able to see it with your bone folder. If you don't have a bone folder you can use any straight edge that you have. We're just measuring at six inch. We're going to line up those marks that we made and make it a little bit thicker. Now, we want to remember what side the right side of the watercolor paper is. The right side is the side that has the texture on it. We want to make sure that that is facing up because that is where we are going to be painting on. Fold the card over like this then add the pressure with the bone folder here to make that a very nice sharp crease. You can have our card this way or it can be up and down. Our card is done. The rest of the paper that we have left is 12 inches by 5 inches. Because I know that this is a size that's super easy to frame and I truly want to encourage you gifting this to a friend, we are going to make it 5 by 7. It is just a standard brain effects. You can use this 5 by 5 square for another project. We have our card and our quote card ready. Now I'm going to show you how we can prep the background before we draw our guidelines so I can break down all the lettering tips for us. 5. Watercolor Backgrounds | Demonstrating Basic Watercolor Techniques: We have our folded card here. I am going to get my paints wet, and I'm going to make a circle confetti background because we are going to be lettering let's celebrate you. I feel like everybody loves confetti and sprinkles, so let's make some. This also gives us a chance to talk about the two types of watercolor techniques that there are. One is called wet-on-wet. It's where you have wet paper and you drop wet paint. That's how you get those really fun, watercolor blooms that we're used to seeing. You can see if I make another circle here and make it big enough, it will touch here and that color will flow and blend. That's the wet-on-wet technique. There's also the wet-on-dry, which is when you have wet paint, but it's on a dry surface. You can see that here you have much more control over where the paint goes. It doesn't bloom out like it does with the wet-on-wet. This is going to be important when we do our brush lettering. We want to make sure that our brush is never too wet or else our lines will get murky and you won't be able to really see the words that you're lettering. But I will break all of that down for you. Right now we are just making circles, getting to know the paint, getting to know our paintbrush. I want you to notice what it's like when you use the side of the brush and how much surface area you can cover when you focus on using the side of the brush versus when you use just the tip of the brush. Just notice what happens. There's no right or wrong way to do this right now. There's no wrong color to choose. [MUSIC] The reason why we are putting this background on first is because if we were to put pencil lines underneath watercolor, we wouldn't be able to erase those pencil lines. We're going to be making pencil lines on a paper because we want guidelines to make sure that things are straight. We want to make sure that this background is dry before we get there. [MUSIC] I don't see you well. Let's see what it looks like when the colors mix. You can fill up as much or as little of the page as you would like. [MUSIC] Remember, we're trying to represent confetti, and celebration, and joy. Just bask in how fun it is to see the paint spread in the water. [MUSIC] Now we're going to set this aside to dry. We have our background, we're ready to letter. But how do you even start? Break it down for you. 6. Font Styles Made Easy: Remember that there are truly only two different ways of writing. There's printing and there's cursive, that's it. But there are always, of course, ways to make things extra. For instance, if you want to give a certain word or phrase emphasis, you can put parts of it in printing or you can put parts of it in cursive. But then you get into printing and that's when things start to get a little technical. You'll start to see things like serif, sans serif. You'll begin to wonder, what does that even mean? Basically, a serif is just to foot. Get it? A foot, I drew it. Anyway. That's cool. What does a foot mean when you're talking about printing? This is an example of something that does not have feet. This is an example of something that does have feet. Can you point out the differences? Here you can see that anytime that there's an extra line embellishment, if you will, that turn the serif font into a sans serif font, the font that has feet and it turns it into a font that does not have feet. See how it's really all just printing? I think of serif as just another word for embellishments. I wanted to give you some inspiration for some feet ideas or some embellishments, if you will. Dashes, Vs. There are all sorts of different embellishments that you can add to your lettering. If you go and you look at any font, you can get inspiration on different feet to add. Sounds so funny to say. Something else that you can add is a triangle, a circle. I want to challenge you to take a second and experiment with three different embellishments that you can come up with. You have the embellishment part done when it comes to feet and printing. But you're probably asking yourself, "I really like when I see those cursive, bubbly letters, that mimic calligraphy." I'm going to show you how easy it is to recreate that with your hand or your brush lettering. It has everything to do with something that's called weight. What is weight? When do we add it? What does it mean? It's really simple. When you hear the word weight, it just means the same thing as line thickness. Something has no weight, the lines are all the same thickness. You can tell that with the weight added. It adds a little bit of emphasis and makes the word stand out a little more. This is an example of how you will add weight with printing. The same rule applies when you're adding weight with cursive and it's simply adding the thick strokes when you go down. When you draw a W, you start down first, so you add weight to that downstroke. You go up, then you go down so you add more weight and then up, and you continue. In your workbook. I outline exactly when and where to add weight for all the cursive letters, so you can practice as much as you want. Here's an example of weight with hand lettering. This is where everything is the same weight. We're going to ignore the fact that this isn't the most beautiful hand lettered piece, but it's for demonstration purposes. This is what it looks like when you add the weight so you can see how on all of the downstrokes, it has a thicker line and then as you go up, it gets thinner to mimic calligraphy. As you can see by my lovely hand lettered example, this is why we need guidelines [LAUGHTER] because I don't know about you, but even sometimes with a ruler I can't trust. There are some rules on how to size your letters and figure out spacing and I'm going to go through all of them with you. 7. How to Draw and Use Lettering Guidelines: Doesn't this remind anyone of elementary school when we were learning how to do penmanship, but it's the same exact thing, so it's just a little fun flashback to our early learning days. The same rules apply. That's what I mean. We already know how to do this. We just have to remind ourselves that this is fun, and that we're learning the rules, so we can break the rules and make our own original pieces and spread some joy and happiness. I'm going to demonstrate how to write and draw the actual guidelines on our pieces, but I want to go over it really quickly. There's five lines that you need to be aware of. There's the baseline. This is where all of our letters sit to make sure that they are all even. We have the midline, which is how we know how far up our lowercase letters go. We have our cap height, which tells us how tall our capital letters go. We have a line that goes just a little bit above the cap height, and it's called the ascender line. It's for the letters like B, F, and H that go a little bit above the cap height. Then underneath the baseline, there's the descender line. This is for letters that go below the baseline. Like, G, Y, P. It's really important to think about the word or phrase that you're going to be lettering as a whole when you are determining where to draw your guidelines. There's no hard and fast rule for how far apart the ascender and descender line needs to be from the cap and the baseline, but the general rule of thumb is if you have a word like celebrate that has an L and a B in it, that both go above the cap height, we want to make sure that they both stop at the same place. The same thing goes for if you have a word that has a G and a Y in it, you want to make sure that they both land on the same descender line. I'm going to show you how we can size it out and experiment with the pieces that we're working on today, so that you can draw guidelines for any future lettering project that you do. 8. Drawing Guidelines for Brush Lettered Artwork: We're going to draw our guidelines for our quote card, we're letter you are magic, I'm going to letter it all in cursive so I can show you how we add weigh with the brush, before I demonstrate that for you, we're going to get our guidelines in order first. To have a 5 by 7 piece of paper, and we want to think about the phrase that we're lettering as a whole and where we want everything to be positioned as well as border that we want to give ourselves. First, I'm going to start with the border, and I'm going to give everything a half-inch border. [MUSIC] We are going to be marking very lightly because we want to be able to erase our pencil lines, and because we're just experimenting with where we want the guidelines at this point, remember that everything is movable. Now we have 6 inches by 4 inches, and we're going to mark the middle, it's three. [MUSIC] I'm going to have this line up here be my ascender line for the first word, and this line be the descender line for the last word. The first word is you, and the last word is magic. I do know that I want to play with the size of the G, and then I can have a descender line for the Y for the U. That can go that way here, and I'm only thinking if I want to make those the same, I don't think that really matters, the middle word is this line right here is going to be the mid-line. I can go ahead and add a dashed line, that's the mid-line. Actually, I'm not going to put an ascender on my U, so I'm just going to have this top-line be the cap height. Let's test it with an inch for the baseline. [MUSIC] That's a half an inch for the mid-line, let's have some fun with this. Draw a line here and make it really big, an inch and a half away. [MUSIC] Our midline here, we want it to be the same inch, let's try that. [MUSIC] I'm going to leave this line as the ascender line for this word right here, and the only letter that's going to go below a little bit is my art, and if I wanted to have my other letters a bit lower, I will make a line, a quarter of an inch [MUSIC] below the baseline till I have that descender line. This is my cap height, I'm going to have this as my ascender line. I'm going to have this be three-fourths of an inch, so I can have a little bit bigger of a descender line right here. We have our guidelines, now very lightly, so I can remember, just go one element at a time, I'm going to sketch out the phrase. 9. How to Sketch Brush Lettered Artwork: [MUSIC] I didn't even go as low as I was supposed to, I was paying attention to this line. Here let's see. [MUSIC] [NOISE] Now that's fun. [MUSIC] Can you see how we're breaking the rules here? We're just having all of the letters go up to the cap line even though they are not capital. [MUSIC] I don't like all of these in like this with this capital. I change my mind immediately after seeing it. I'm going to make this smaller. If that means that this isn't quite in the middle, it's going to be okay. This magic needs to be bigger as a whole. You can go ahead and erase that a little bit, all of that. [MUSIC] I do you want my C to be nice and big right here though. [MUSIC] We are going to start with magic and then we'll squeeze all in once we have this sketched out and situated. [NOISE] Let me draw super lightly. [MUSIC] Let's have a fourth of an inch, a center line. Then there is an inch between the O's. [NOISE] [MUSIC] This needs to be moved in the center. [MUSIC] Perfect. We have our sketch. Let's figure out a guidelines for our cart. 10. Designing Guidelines for Hand Lettered Cards: We are going to a letter, let's celebrate you. Now I want everything to be in the middle. I'm just going to measure two inches, drawing very lightly on top of the watercolor because it's almost near impossible to erase lines under watercolor. [MUSIC] We're going to want a top and a bottom border. I'm not super worried about the sides because the biggest word is going to be celebrate and we're going to be starting in the middle. I'm not worried about the sides here. I'm just worried about the top and the bottom. Since this is six inches [MUSIC] let's do half an inch. [MUSIC] Oops. [MUSIC] This is going to be my cap height for let's and this is going to be my baseline for you. Going to mark the midline [MUSIC] at three inches because this is where I want celebrate to be in the middle of. Because half of six is three [MUSIC] so I'm just going to draw a couple of dash-lines right here and because I know I want celebrate to be in the center, I'm going to go ahead and break the guidelines for that right now. If this is the center and half an inch between [MUSIC]. There's no any words that go to the descender line and celebrate. But I do want to make sure that because I am going to write this word in cursive, that my loops down touch the same area or point are all line up all those things. Just a quarter of an inch down. I'm going to go ahead and draw the descender line. [MUSIC] The L and the B in celebrate are going to go above the line; so we can exaggerate that a little bit [BACKGROUND] by having this go up a half an inch. Remember, we are just guessing with the guidelines right now. We're going with the center because we know that's the place to start with because we know we want that word to be in the center of the page. Then we're going to base the other two distances and guidelines off of what's left. You may need to make adjustments. Each piece that you letter is going to have different measurements that you need to make for your guidelines. That's why I am walking you through the process here. We'll be [MUSIC] able to make guidelines for anything that you want in a letter in the future. [MUSIC] We have an inch and a half and here we have an inch and a forth. Perfect. I know I want some space between this ascender line right here and the baseline. I'm going to go about a quarter of an inch up [MUSIC] to draw the baseline. I'm saying baseline instead of descender line because I know that I want this first word to be printed. Because I really want celebrate to be emphasized. Then to make the you stand out a little bit. I think that I'm going to have it in big block letters and we can paint the inside with our watercolor. [MUSIC] Measure out mid line-ish. Let's have this. A fourth of an inch down as well. [MUSIC] I'm going to sketch in our words before we go over it with our pen. 11. Modern Calligraphy Made Easy with a Bonus on the Color Wheel and Watercolor Blending: [MUSIC] While I'm hand lettering, I'm paying very close attention to the weight of my letters. I want to make sure that each of the letters are all around the same thickness. Remember that you can't take away thickness, you can only add to it. So that's why I'm starting super thin and I adjust and see if I want to add a thickness to it later. [MUSIC] You want to make sure that your pen is permanent and archival. That's so that you know that it's okay to erase over it because you'll notice, we left the pencil lines on this one. Unlike when we were brush lettering, these pens allow us to erase the pencil lines underneath. We'll cover up the pencil lines seamlessly so there's no need to erase them. We want to make sure that if we are going to erase on top of them, the ink isn't going to smear all of our hard work away. You can see I made this just a little bit thicker so it stands out. I'm going to do the rest of the letters so they are approximately the same thickness to each letter. [MUSIC] Okay, good. Now if I wanted to, I could add some embellishments to make this a serif font, but I like it as a sans serif and I think it'll be a fun sort of juxtaposition with the block letters sans serif. But if you want to experiment with some of your own embellishments that you came up with, I would love to see them in the project section below. Now we're going to letter celebrate the same way. We are going to focus on being very thin. We are going to add the weight to the downstrokes so we can get that nice look like our brush lettering or if we were doing calligraphy. Again, just go slow. Everything is going to be the same thin weight right now. You can do small short lines. If you have a shaky hand like I do, practice pen control, you can try and draw it all in one line. There's no right or wrong answer. [MUSIC] I do know that I want to add some weight. Right on the inside right here, I'm going to draw a line coming down and fill it in. You don't have to press super hard with the pens, let the ink do its magic. [MUSIC] All right. Then it's going to be the same thing. I'm going to go right up here at the top because this is a downstroke and then meet right here where this curve is going to be for the E fill that in. [MUSIC] This is going to be the downstroke on the inside right here and fill that in. [MUSIC] This is a downstroke. [MUSIC] I'm going to erase the pencil lines before we fill in the rest of this with watercolor, and then we're done. Try and pay attention to what colors are inside of your letters already. For instance, this is like an orange yellow. So I want to make sure that I don't have any blue in it because that's the opposite color of orange in the color wheel. If orange mixes with blue, it'll turn kind of brown and I don't want brown right here. Same thing goes for this red. So that makes me remember not to use very much green. But also I'm not going to think about it too much and just have fun. What I'm going to do is fill in the inside of this letter just water. You'll notice that your colors that you've already put underneath will probably start to bleed and run together, and that's fine. We're using our pen outline as the borders, so make sure you don't get outside of that wet. This has some water in it and you can already see that that orangey color has started to move. So I'm just going to help move it along. Let's add some other colors with it, let's add some yellow. [MUSIC] Then let's have some red. We're going to make sure that our wet from here does not touch the other letters, or else all the colors will start to run together. But we're going to do the same thing for the O, fill it in with all water. This is another reason why it's important to use a waterproof pen with what we're doing. I think I want this nice teal color because it's one of my favorites. I'm just going to drop that in. [MUSIC] I know that I said no red and green, but because this is a light pink, I'm just going to put a little bit of green on top and see what happens. If it turns brown, well, it turns brown. It did not turn brown. I'm not going to manipulate it too much because you can see how it is starting to change colors down at the bottom. I need a little bit more blue in here. [MUSIC] I need some more. I'm not going to move this around because you can see how it's starting to get muddy down here where the green and the pink mixed, but it's okay. Then we're going to do the same thing for the U. [MUSIC] 12. Brush Lettering Basics: The only difference between hand and brush lettering is if you're using a brush or if you're using a marker or pen or your hand. Basically, you're distinguishing whether or not you have a brush in your hand. That's it. As you are practicing, there are a lot of people that will tell you that you have to make these perfect thick downstrokes, the this upstrokes connects them seamlessly. We are going to mimic those thick downstrokes by making a small line with our brush, adding a little rectangle, and then coloring the rectangle in with watercolor. Lifting our hand up and far away as much as possible and as much as needed and then coming back in and adding that nice upstroke, just using new tip of our brush. We're definitely utilizing the wet-on-dry technique to get us that nice sharp line. We're playing with wet-on-wet when we have this blend that we're making right here. You can see why it's really important to have a small brush, so you what it looks like with the letter A? Remember I don't have guidelines right now. [MUSIC] Curve, and here around the curve is where it gets a little bit tricky, so I'm picking up my brush and then I'm just going to [MUSIC] up, and then it comes down like this. [MUSIC] Before I add my tail, I'm going to add in my weight. How I do that is I get just a little bit of water on my brush. I wipe this side to make sure that there's not a bead of pigment on my brush. Then I'm going right inside of the A. [MUSIC] Tending that line by just reactivating the pigment here because I haven't connected the top of this yet. I'm going to come back down and do that. I'm just going to draw that same tiny little rectangle and then fill it in and add a line. I'm going to demonstrate how to do each of the letters for our quote. They are examples of where all the upstrokes and downstrokes need to be added in your downloadable workbook for you to revisit and make as many different hand lettering things as you want. We're going to take a deep breath. We're going to get started. We're going to have fun, most importantly. Remember, take your time. You don't need to put pressure on yourself. This is supposed to be fun. We have to erase our pencil marks, but it's going to be okay. Trust me. We're only going to do one word at a time, we'll still be able to see a little bit where our guidelines are, so don't fret too much. I'm going to keep my guideline for my cap, and my base past where my word ends, so I'll be able to connect that imaginary line that is there now. [MUSIC] There's my downstroke, and add the weight right now. [MUSIC] I'm working slowly as I go around this curve. Nice and in upstroke and then this is going to come down. Feel free to get more water. You can tell when your brush doesn't glide as easily down your paper. But you want to make sure that you shake off that first water droplet bubble because we don't want too much water added at this point, because we're still working on having everything the same weight before we go in and add those thick downstrokes. I'm going very slowly. I am actually going to start back over this way. [MUSIC] We get out where the bottom of this y, is going to go. Because this is a downstroke, I'm going to go ahead and add the weight, getting a little bit more pigment on my brush. Don't want it to be too dark, so I'm going to go ahead and dip it in the water and shake out. Drawing my rectangle line over again, and instead of doing the whole thing because it is so long down, I'm going to work in sections. I really want to make sure that I get rid of the harsh line that's going to be created between this paint being dry right here and the wet paint that I'm currently adding, you just do that by slowly going over the dry area, sits with the width. [MUSIC] We keep adding a little bit of weight till the curve right here. It's going to get thinner because this is an upstroke. I want to keep the thinness. I'm working really slowly because my hands are shaky to just keep that line. If you have shaky hands like me, it's okay. Work in small short strokes. Pick your pen up as often as you need to. Don't make your life harder because you feel like there is some arbitrary rule that you need to follow about not lifting your pen. Because that held me up for a very long time. I'm just going through, and I'm softening those lines. [MUSIC] Seeing there is small little strokes to form my layers. Back in and out of the weight and I get just a little bit more pigment and water. It's actually a little bit darker than I wanted it to be. I'm going to clean my brush off, dab it on a paper towel and use the water in the pigment that is in here and now my brush is a little bit drier. I'm just going to use that to manipulate the rest of the letter by adding the weight with the brush. Slow, I'll connect this right here. [MUSIC] I'm going to add the weight. [MUSIC] Then you continue with the rest of the layers. [NOISE] It's going to have the A attached to it. It's going to turn right around here. [MUSIC] That's an upstroke and then come around the corner, and we're going to add in that pigment, and go over the rest so it blends nicely. [MUSIC] This is an upstroke, but we're coming around and down. We're adding the weight and we're blending. We have a nice thin upstroke and we turn the corner. We are going to add the weight on the inside right here. [MUSIC] You add the weight. [MUSIC] Perfection. Now, I am going to do that fun thing where I get some paint on my brush. I use this brush in a minute [NOISE] to do the splatter. [NOISE] Its magical splatters, neighboring some joy. Once this is dry, I'm going to go and erase the rest of my pencil marks. 13. Your Hand Lettered Card and Brushed Lettered Artwork Are Complete!: Here are our finished pieces. They look so good. I hope you had fun creating these with me. Make sure you share your project below. Grab your workbook so you can practice your letters over and over again. I can't wait to hear how you are able to create hand-lettered pieces to remind yourself of how great you are, to remind those around you how much they mean to you, and so, we can all spread some happiness and joy together.