Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to Lettering in Color for Skillshare, creating colorful lettering using Fudenosuke Colors. I am your class instructor, Kiley Bennett of Kiley in Kentucky. I've been lettering since 2015, and in that time, I had done a little bit of everything. I've sold on Etsy, I've blogged about every facet of lettering, collaborated with companies like Starbucks and Brinco. In January of 2018, my first book, Super Simple Hand Lettering, hit stores across the US. My lettering practice has grown quite a bit since 2015, but just like you, I had to start somewhere, and that's where this class comes into play for you. In this class, you don't need any prior lettering experience. I'll take you through everything you need to know about using a brush pen, and by the end of this class you will be creating lettering you are proud of using easy but impressive techniques. No worries if you don't have the exact tools I'm using throughout class. This class is sponsored by Tombow USA, so a lot of the products I'm using are provided by Tombow. If you don't have these products in your collection, I have a special 25 percent off discount code, that is KILEY25 at checkout at www.tombowusa, so you can pick up the products that I use in class, if you don't already have them. If you have any questions at all, you can of course, contact me through Skillshare, but you can also reach me by email at, hello@kileyinkentucky.com. I encourage you to share your class project here on Skillshare with everyone else that's taking the class. But if you're not comfortable with that, I hang out on Instagram a lot, so you can tag me @kileyinkentucky, and makes sure to tag Tombow USA as well. I would love for you to use the #fudenosukecolors when sharing about this class. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get started.
2. Tools + Materials Overview: Before we dive into the learning portion of the class, I want to go ahead and walk you through all of the supplies that I'll be using throughout the lessons and then the class projects at the end. First off, I've created this printable lettering workbook, it's five separate worksheets that take you from start to finish of getting started with using a brush pen if you have never used one before, this will be awesome for you. I have printed these out on regular printer copy paper and that's fine too but one thing to go ahead and think about is that your tips on your brush pen are very delicate and they could fray easily on something like a copy paper, so I think that it's great to have tracing paper on hand, this is just a tracing pad from Hobby Lobby and you can tear a piece of tracing paper out, place it onto your worksheet and then go ahead and use it as it's intended. That way to keep your brush pins healthy and happy and to get the most use out of them. In addition, you'll also want to have some super smooth card stock. This is my favorite super smooth card stock and I've got this linked below in the product list, that's in the about this class section. Or you can pick up something that's labeled for markers. Anything that's labeled for markers is going to be really smooth and this will also really protect your brush pens as well. When we're working on actually sketching our quote or a lettered piece for class projects, I've got two different pencils that I wanted to talk with you guys about. This first one is the Olno Swift Pencil, this is from Tombow and this is so cool. I'll show you how it works and we get into that but this rubber grip on here, just to make sketching really fun, really high-quality lead and this is a really neat pencil. The main star of the show is of course the Fudenosuke colors which I will talk all about as we start using them in the next lesson, Learning how to use a brush pen, but these are so much fun and if you don't have these, definitely take advantage of that 25 percent off code that I have for Tombow and pick these up. For various parts of the class, you'll probably want to have an eraser and this is my very favorite eraser, this is the Dust Catch Mono Eraser by Tombow. It's called Dusk Catch for a reason, if I can say it, because it actually catches your eraser dust and it leaves a lot less behind than a normal eraser. I absolutely love this and I can't wait to show you how this works and the magic that it is. The last item I will be using in this class is a light box, this is from Cricut. I absolutely loved this light box. There are a lot of cheaper options out there. If you don't have a light box, don't worry about it, I will provide some alternative solutions. If you don't have one of these when that part of the class comes, but just keep in mind that you don't have to spend a lot of money on a light box, there are some affordable ones that I'll try to link those for this class as well.
3. Lesson 1: Learn to Brush Letter!: In lesson 2, like I said, I'm going to teach you how to use a brush pen and I'm going to use the Fudenosuke colors brush pens by Tombow USA. Let's go over how you even pronounce these pens. They are FU-DE-NO-SU-KE, just like it looks. I know it's confusing, but it's a Japanese word that literally translates to brush that helps, as in helps your strokes. These Fudenosuke brush pens have actually been around since 2001 and are extremely popular with brush lettering artists of all skill levels. They are my preferred pen to use when lettering, but the color version is a pretty big deal because these were only available in black and gray ink until September of 2018 when Tombow released the color packs. This is a huge deal and this is what inspired me wanting to create this class about colorful lettering. These brush pens are actually known as small brush pens. A dual brush pen would be known as a large brush pen. So you can definitely see the difference in size. The difference in size when it comes to the tips of those pens, so this is large and this is small. That's pretty obvious. The Fudenosuke colors are also known as hard-tipped pens. If you've ever used the Fudenosuke pens before, there is a different version called a soft tip. The barrel looks just a little bit different. The barrel of the soft tip is black, while the barrel of the hard-tipped pens is navy. It might be hard to see through the camera, but it's very obvious in person and that's a good way to know which one you're picking up. But each of the colors in this pack is going to be a hard-tipped pen. That's great news for you if you're a beginner because this is an excellent pen to start with, because I find in my classes that beginners feel they have more control with the hard-tip pen than you might have with the soft tip or even with the dual brush pen. If you're ready to go, let's go ahead and get out our worksheets we've printed and also watch every single one of these colors as we work through our lettering worksheets and learn how to use the pencil that you can actually see them in action. Like I said before, I'm going to just take a piece of tracing paper and lay it on top of my workbook so that I can protect my pens a little bit more. Tracing paper is also so slick and smooth that it will be easier, I think for you to letter on than just a regular card stock, especially if you're just starting out. But if you're not just starting out, this is a great warm-up for you to go ahead and get warmed up for the class projects that we'll complete at the end. I'm going to start with the red pen and then pack to show you how to hold the brush pen. In my opinion, there is not a wrong or a right way to do it, but really however you feel most comfortable. I hold my brush pen slightly different than I would hold a normal pen or pencil to write. A good rule of thumb that I always teach in my in-person classes is to hold the pen between your thumb and index finger, just like this, and then to hold it at a 45 degree angle to the paper. It's going to be at a 45-degree angle with your paper or with your surface that you're writing on, and that way the pen rests gently in this space between your thumb and your index finger like mine is doing right now. You can start holding your pen this way and then if that doesn't feel really comfortable for you, then you can just adjust until you find a way that it does feel comfortable. Now, let's actually begin lettering. What makes a brush pen and brush lettering unique? It's all in the tip of the pen. Brush lettering is consisted of up-strokes and down-strokes, which are what these first three lines are right here. Now, what's actually special about a brush pen and how you achieve different up-strokes and down-strokes and different thicknesses in your letters is because the tip is flexible and you can press on it and apply pressure. So if you can see that the pen is bending as I apply pressure to it. If I barely touch the pen to the tip of the paper and drag it upward without applying any pressure at all, then I will have a really thin line and that's an up-stroke. That's what that looks like. When I apply pressure as I'm moving down, the tip will bend and I will get a thicker line and this is called a down-stroke. Go ahead and practice creating a really thin line by barely grazing your pen across the paper when you're going in an upward motion to practice up-strokes. Then also practice moving down and applying pressure to the tip of the pen, otherwise known as creating down-strokes. Once you are feeling pretty comfortable with creating up-strokes and down-strokes, move on to the third line and where you will alternate between creating a really thin up-stroke and switching to a thick down-stroke. I'm going to go ahead and fill all these first three lines completely up to get warmed up, and then we can move on to the rest of the lines on this first page to start preparing ourselves for script. I also want to point out that up-strokes are especially tricky for me because I drink a lot of coffee and I have somewhat of a shaky hands. If you find that you have a shaky hand, just know that that's normal and know that exercises just like this will help combat a shaky hand. I find that I always have a lot more control on the down-stroke because you're actually pressing that pen into the paper and it's acting as an anchor. But on the up-stroke, you are lightly touching it and that can be a lot more difficult to maintain a steady line. Just know that practice for this is completely normal and you should be practicing your strokes before you letter every time just to get warmed up. Once again, you can print this worksheet out as many times as you need to and you can use it forever if you have a pad of tracing paper. For handy, so I'm going to go ahead and fill this out and I'll see you when you're ready to prep for script. Next, I'm going to grab the orange pen in the pack to show you how this looks as we prepare for script. These little squiggly lines here are going to help you prepare for creating continuous strokes where you'll be switching from a thin up-stroke to a thick down-stroke, especially when you're writing in script. When you're writing in just a print alphabet like we'll do after we do this exercise, you won't have to worry about that as much as far as creating continuous strokes, but it's still good to do as a warm up. Go ahead and grab your pen and start tracing the squiggly line. So the reason why this first little line here, even though we're moving down isn't thick, is because I'm really preparing for how I write in scripts, which is I always have a little beginner line that leads into the letter that isn't necessarily thick or thin, it's just a decorative line. You can make that thick if you would like to. Let's go ahead and start tracing that. You're going to start your thick down-stroke. When we transition up, we're going to release all pressure on the pen and then as we go over that hump and transition down again, you're going to apply pressure and get a thick line. This definitely takes a lot practice to achieve the first time. If you need to take a breath and go back into it, then that's perfectly fine. But just remember, anytime your pen is moving in an upward motion or away from your body, you're going to release all pressure and just barely graze your pen across the paper. As you start to feel that your pen is moving back down towards your body, press, apply pressure, and you'll get a fixed stroke. If you can, just continue this line, go as slow as you need to go, as you can see I'm going pretty slow. Now as we move down, we're going to be transitioning from making one level of strokes here to going to different heights, but it's the exact same idea. You're just going to be moving a little bit more on the upstroke. Go all the way up and then down. Same idea in our upstroke, we're barely applying any pressure until we move downward, and we're pressing our pen to achieve a thicker stroke. It's fun once you get going on a roll. Great. Okay. I think we're ready to actually move on and begin creating letters. Grabbed my yellow pen here to start creating our print alphabet, and if you are feeling a little bit intimidated and unsure of how you're going to know when to do a thin upstroke or when to do a thick downstroke, don't worry because I'm going to show you. Upstrokes and downstrokes happen naturally in our handwriting all the time, we just never think about it. Creating your print alphabet here, I'll walk you through knowing exactly when to do that. Really, when you make your upstroke, it's the exact same as the exercises. If you're pen is moving away from your body or in an upward motion, then you are going to barely apply any pressure just like so. As you round that curve, you're going to apply pressure to get that thick downstroke, and then as you go side to side, because that happens often in letters, it's going to be a thin stroke as well. So the only time that you are applying pressure and getting a thick stroke is when you are moving down. Starting with this lowercase a, we're going to start where you would normally start creating an a. I'm first moving to this side so I'm going to apply no pressure until I start curving downward, going to apply pressure, release it as I come up and apply it again as I move down. Let's go through it again. Starting with this B. First stroke that I would naturally make when creating a B is this big stroke right here, I'm going to move down and apply pressure. Then for these curves, going to barely apply any moving up as I transition down, high-pressure, transitioning down, apply pressure and release it. Down, up, down, up. Up, down, up, up, down, up. Let me go ahead and grab my green pen to finish tracing this, and I will simply speed this up maybe just a little bit, trace through the rest of the print alphabet so you can see how it's done. Then we'll meet back up when we're ready to start working on script alphabet which comes next. [MUSIC] Now I forgot to mention that the spaces in between these letters are actually meant for you to then create your own, outside it without tracing. So if there's a letter that you're finding you have a little bit more trouble with, then after you trace it, you can even move your tracing paper over to then trace it again. But I encourage you to go out to the side and practice creating it on your own without tracing. [MUSIC] Now that you've gone through your print alphabet and even numbers, I'm going to grab the purple pen from the Fudenosuke Colors pack and start tracing over our script alphabet, and showing you how to use the brush pen to create scripts lettering. Once again, it's the exact same idea as print alphabet and as the upstroke and downstroke exercises that you did. You are going to start where you would naturally start and keep in mind, what direction is your pen moving? It's going up, it's going to be a thin stroke. If it's going down, you're going to apply pressure and create a thick stroke, and then once again side to side, it's going to be a thin stroke as well. Right here, I don't know if you can see it, but I messed up. Let me see if I can show you. If you can see right here, I messed up a little bit and that isn't a perfect transition. If that happens, you can just take the tip of your pen and just go over it until it's evened out, and that's a trick that will be good for you to know throughout your lettering practice. By continuing on, it's the exact same idea just with a couple extra lines because scripts lettering is a little bit fancier than print. If you're feeling a little bit confused on where to begin creating your letters, then my suggestion is just to follow what I'm doing here in this video, and you can watch it as many times as you need to watch it. You can take your own cursive script writing and apply it here as well. Try and tracing, and then try creating the letters on your own. I'm going to go ahead and trace through this and I'll see you when we are done. Now I'm ready to move on with actually creating words. These are going to be script words because print words are pretty straightforward. Print alphabet, you don't have to do a lot of work to put a word together with the basic alphabet template that I've given you. But for script, people are often a little bit intimidated by, how do you connect script letters together? Let's go ahead and just dive right in. I've got the pink pen, this is my absolute favorite color of the footnote key pens. Now I'm just going to start by tracing this A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, you can continue it down the line if you wanted to or you can just trace. Starting with A, we're just going to start with a capital here, which you learned. This is the exact A from the practice sheet. Then you can either connect your next letter to the capital or not. It doesn't really matter. As you'll see on the next page, I cannot do it just depending on what the letter is. But let's just jump right into B. Then you're going to connect your letters just like you would in cursive. I'm just going to do a little thin stroke to connect the B to the C, and I'm going to move right into the D and I'm going to stop right there, and then create my D normally. So whereas in cursive you're encouraged to keep your pen on the paper and to never release your pen until you're done writing the word, now cursive is for effectiveness, I guess, or it's for speed and for writing things quickly. But brush lettering is not about speed, it's not about going fast, it's about taking your time and creating really beautiful letters. It's perfectly acceptable to pick your pen up, and if anyone tells you that it's not, then they clearly don't understand that art is supposed to be fun and relaxing and not stressful. Do what you want to do. Once again, to connect the D to the E, I'm just making this little thin stroke, little upstroke and then just moving right into my D starting it or into my E, starting it where I would naturally start it. So really, I think the point is you can just use these little strokes to transition into the next one. I did not transition my G right into my H because I like doing these little fun flourishes at the bottom, like this. Now, also I like doing my flourish at the top of the H like this. But if you didn't want to do that, let's say if you're writing the word enough for instance, which has an G-H combination. You can see I'm just using this little stroke right here to connect. If you wanted to connect your G and your H, you can just do that right there. That's how you would do that. But I like adding a little flair here. It's really up to you and it's all about personal style. We've got three more colors in the pack here to swatch. I will go ahead and do the word balloon in pink. Then I will go ahead and speed this up a little bit and you can watch what I'm doing and see how I am creating these words, and I'll swatch the rest of the remaining colors in the key pack, and then when we're done, we'll be ready to start moving onto the next lesson, which is really exciting.
4. Lesson 2: Sketching + Layout: In this lesson, I want to talk about sketching and getting a quote ready to actually use the brush pins and to create a beautiful colored lettering piece. For this, I've got just a regular piece of copy paper to sketch on. You can sketch on marker paper, you can sketch on card stock, whatever you want. But I just grabbed a sheet of copy paper, got the Tombow desk catch eraser, and I've got the Tombow almost swift mechanical pencil and also I have it in a couple different colors as well. So these are just fun pencils to have, and you can have a couple. I keep one in my desk, one in my travel bag that I take with me to a coffee shop or out and about just in case. Then this one I'm going to let my husband have this one to take to school because he does drafting. What I love about this pencil, what's really cool about it, is that you don't have to switch your grip when you need more lead. Usually, a normal mechanical pencil, you have to switch your grip and you have to press more lead out by pushing on the end but with the almost swift pencil, you just move your thumb back or that's how I have to do it because I guess I have no hand strength. But you just press on the barrel and it bends and then more lead comes out the top. I think that is super cool. This is a really fine lead which I prefer for sketching, and that's why I'm using it in this lesson. When you are picking out a quote or a phrase to then make into a full lettered piece, you have to start by sketching out that phrase on your sketch paper. It's really hard for me to share all of the tips and tricks and things that I have learned over three years of lettering because a lot of the sketching thing is trial and error in it's doing, and it's intuitive after a while. After you've been lettering for as long as I have, the sketching process becomes so easy and quick and fast and fun. So I hope that everything in this lesson today will help you out. The first thing I want to talk about is creating something called thumbnails. I'm sure you've heard of these before, but what thumbnails are, is just little mini ideas, mini options that you have for how your final lettered piece is going to be laid out. The quote that I'm choosing for today is, "Life is art, live yours in color. " This is the quote that we're going to use for both of our class projects. There are two different techniques and I'll have that appear while we're sketching so that you can keep that in mind. I'm going to just write it out up here to help me color. Whoops, "Life as art, live yours in color." Just writing that out, I hope you can see that on the paper, I'm going to circle a couple of words that aren't important. Is and in are not important, and yours is probably not as important, but life, art, live, and color, those are the big words that I want to emphasize when I'm sketching. I'm just going to create a couple of thumbnails. You can do this however you want. You can draw squares, you can draw rectangles, you can draw a circle. I like to usually letter within a rectangle or a square, even though it might not look like it in my final piece, that's what I like to have. Now, I'm just going to use my regular handwriting for this. I'm not going to worry about lettering fancy at this point and time. I might want to do life at the top is art, live. I like how this thumbnail looks already because it seems like I've already gotten balance. I've got live and color are even and then yours in, fits nicely in between these two, and then life is art, not loving that. So let's try doing life is art on one line. Life is art, live yours in color. That's pretty boring, but you've got all of your letters evenly spaced out. Once again, this is just sketching, this is just getting some options down. This is not going to look like our final piece at all. But once we have a layout that we're happy with, we can then move on to putting it with script writing and with print and using that brush pen. I think I like the bottom of this one better. I'm going to go ahead and carry this down. Live yours in color. I think I'm going to do life is art, and maybe we'll add some embellishments here to really get that balance too. Let's try one more. Let's just free hand this one. I'm just going to free hand this one because that's more of my style. Live yours. This is more of my style. I normally don't do things so balanced and so even, but if one of these works better for you, I definitely encourage you to take one of those thumbnails into our actual lettered piece when we are ready to start working on class projects. But I think for me something a little bit more free and a little less structured is going to be more along the lines of my style. I've also got things at a diagonal, where things were more in straight lines here. I've got things turned on their side just a little bit because to me, what makes my lettering me and what makes it unique is that things are usually not in a straight line, and they're not perfect, and they look a little bit wonky and I like that. That's just a short little talk about thumbnails. You could fill up a whole page of thumbnails where you are trying out different things, trying out how you would like your piece to be laid out. One thing to always be mindful of is just balance. Does it look balanced? Because even if something is not in a straight line like this, it still looks like it has some balance to it. Its layout really can be improved by just creating a whole sheet of thumbnails, practicing this a lot and not being intimidated by the blank sheet of paper, just diving in and doing it and getting practice. Let's go ahead, and I'm going to just take this freestyle look into our sketch paper where we're actually going to start preparing for our first-class project. I've got my marker pad, and we're going to flip it open. Just looking at my thumbnail, got 1, 2, 3, 4 lines though I'm going to just put this to the side so I can look at it as I'm sketching. Now I need to figure out how large is my piece going to be, and if you've ever seen any of my work, I like to do things on the side of the paper and not really on the direct middle of the paper. That's just my style, you can do yours wherever you'd like. Mine is going to be about this big. That is the perfect size for me. Perfect size for me to put all of this in here to feel like it's going to be large enough for me to get those techniques across in our class project, but not so big that I'm struggling and having a hard time fitting everything close together. That's once again, just personal preference. If you want to fill up this whole page, I want you to go for it. I just start sketching. You can always erase, go back, change things. This is not set in stone, this is just a sketch, and I'm going to go ahead and start applying my script to this. My script is just the cursive script that I like to use but you are encouraged to use the exact same cursive or script writing that was in the workbook or if you'd like to use print, you can also use that. I'm going to mix script in print for this, so life is that's going to be in print because I want the less important words to not stick out as much as these big important words are in script life is art. Right now I'm seeing which my eye is just naturally trained to it I think, but I'm seeing where things are going to fit together like this t is going to come out beside this f because there's some free space. Once again, I'm going to go back and fix this, but be mindful of free space and filling things up as you're going. I think I'm already going to run out of room. Stay prints, and I'm just going to follow the shape. This right here to make it a little bit fun, quirky and then I'm going to fill up color. That is a super rough sketch, let's go over it. What I like to do is I like to just go back on top of this directly and just make a darker line and fix some things up. So I'm going to move this life up just a little bit. I'm not going to make the bottom of this f so pronounced. I got to make a little bit a room because I ran out of room down here. Life is, it looks like a hot mess, but this is how I like to do it. Don't be afraid to make a mess on the paper. Ops, this lead is delicate. Let me tell you. I'm going to make sure that period doesn't get lost there either. I'm just going to move these letters up, and make them a little bit larger in some cases to fit and fill up some of this room. I'm going to change color to follow the curve of this bottom line here. I'm going to keep it in print, it's still going to be bold but I want it to follow. Look at that. There's nil eraser dust. That's what I love about this eraser. It catches all of the eraser dust. I think that's what I want for this first class project. Now, I'm going to be using the same quote for the second class project and I'm just going to stick with this sketch. I think it's going to look really neat with both of the techniques that we're going to show off in our class projects.
5. Lesson 3: Rainbow Gradient Lettering: For the first class project, and using the first technique that I'm teaching, I've got my cricket bright pad out that I'm going to use to actually transfer my sketch onto the final piece of paper that I want my a piece to go on, which is a super smooth card stock. I've got this linked below. I'm going to just turn my bright pad on, and place the paper where I want it to be. Like I said before, I like things to be off a little bit. I sketched this on the bottom left corner originally, and I would totally be fine with it going in the bottom-left corner. But now I think I wanted in the top right corner. That's me changing my mind. But wherever you want to place yours will look awesome. Then I am using all of the colored pens from the Fudenosuke pack. Just as a quick reminder, this is what the pack looks like and then the only colors I'm not using are the brown, gray, and black, but I'll be using the gray and the black in my next class projects. You'll get to see those as well. For this class projects we are creating what I call a rainbow lettering gradient, which means we're going to create a rainbow gradient starting from the left and moving all the way to the right. You can use whichever colors you want from the pack. You could do just maybe some of the warmer colors or you can do the cooler colors, either way would look great, but I want to take advantage and use all of these colors. I'm going to position these in the order that I want the transition to move in. I want to start with red, pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. So that's the transition of the gradient. I want to start with red over here and I want to end with purple. How we're going to do that is we're going to actually place our markers right below or on top. But we're going to take the red out because I don't think it's going to fit. That's one thing to also be mindful of when you're creating a rainbow lettering gradient, is how large your piece is determines how many markers you can really use, how many colors you can use, and it still looks natural and every color gets a moment in the spotlight. That make sense? So I think this will be good enough. Now how I'm going to do this is, I'm just going to take my pencil and I'm just going to draw a line. Oops. This is my final piece of paper y'all. Almost had disaster, but we stopped it. Make a line right here. I'm going to write p right above this to denote that that's where my pink is going to go. We can actually turn this off. The orange is going to be from there to there. Now I know where all my colors should start and where they should end. I promise this is going to make sense when we start getting into it. I'm going to use my beautiful eraser. Guys, there's one piece of dust. I cannot with this eraser. It's too good. So let's turn on our bright pad. If you don't have one of these, there's a lot of ways you can do this. You could letter directly on top of your sketch, and then use a really nice eraser to erase it. I do that all the time. I did that for years before I got a bright pad. It works perfectly. You can use the same method of having a light source beneath your sketch to illuminate through your final piece of paper. By holding them both up to a window. You could take them up where you want them to be, and just stand and do your lettering that way. I've done that before. If you have a glass coffee table or something like that, you can put your phone flashlight beneath and it'll work the same way as the light box. So there are alternatives and options, but if you don't have either of those things, simply drawing or lettering on top of your sketch and erasing the pencil beneath it works great. Lots of people do it. Let's go ahead and get started with pink. We see our line here. We see that everything to the left of this line is going to be pink. Now is when we actually take our brush pen, and we're going to letter everywhere to the left of that first line. That means we are going to be cutting off some of our letters here because the top of this L goes into orange territory, so we're going to stop there. This can be a little bit tricky if you're not really used to brush pen lettering yet and up strokes and down strokes and all of that stuff that I promise I will walk you through it, and you will be a pro with this. We're going to go ahead, start on our upstroke and make a thin line. I'm going to stop where that line is for orange. I'm just going to leave that be. I'm going to come up here, and finish my L. I know that this is a down stroke so I'm going to press, apply pressure and I'm going to get nice decline. It wasn't as smooth as I wanted it to be. I'm just going to go down through here and just use the tip of my pen to smooth it out, and to make sure that it looks good. That is not cheating, you can do that. Now I'm going to move on down the line and all we have left here is our A. I'm going to go ahead and create my A. I'm going to stop where that line is. I believe that is all we've got for pink. Actually, my line was a little bit crooked, so here's what we're going to do. I'm going to extend my line to match where this L stops. Just like that. Now the L and the A stop in the same area. We've got a little of this C in here too, so we'll go ahead and make that. Now we're ready to move on to orange. I'm going to pick up my orange pen. We're going to move into orange territory and we're going to fill in everywhere that there is supposed to be orange. Now this is where you'll find there's a little bit of blending involved in making the transition from one color to another work. How you do that is you simply just take your pen and go back and forth where that transition is until it looks smooth, and I promise it actually works pretty quickly. Once again I'm going to stop where the yellow is supposed to begin, and then do just a little bit of blending to make that transition look good. Move on down. Done with orange, now time to move into the yellow. You're going to do the same thing. I'm going to go ahead and speed this up a little bit and finish the rest of the gradient and you can follow along and see how I'm doing everything. But you pretty much have the hang of it by now. So I'll see you when it is completed. There you have it. That's how you create the easiest rainbow lettering gradient ever. This is so easy, but it looks so impressive. You get a chance to utilize all of the colors in the Fudenosuke pack that you want to. If you wanted to go from start to finish using every color in the pack, you could absolutely do that and it would look fantastic. Let's go ahead and move on to the second class project.
6. Lesson 4: 3-D Shadow Effect: For the second class project, I've got the exact same setup as the first where I've got my sketch underneath on top of the light-box and I've got my final piece of paper here on top. For this lesson, I'm only going to be using the red, orange, gray, and black colors from the Fudenosuke pack to create this really awesome dynamic, blended, but 3D lettering look that is so fun and super cool to create. To create this blended lettering look, I want to start with my lightest color. That's really the key here, no matter which color combinations you're using, is to start with the lightest color first. If you were using green and yellow, you would want to start with your yellow first. If you were using blue and green, you'd want to start with your green first. We want our darker color to work as the shading, and you'll see what I mean once we get started. I'm going to set these to the side, and I'm just going to go in and I'm going to trace over this entire piece with my orange, which is my lighter color of the two that I'm using. Go ahead and speed this up and I will catch up with you when it is all finished, already to move on to shadowing. That was actually all we needed our light box for, because from here on now we're just going to be using our pens to create the blended 3D lettering look. Though you've traced to over the sketch in your lightest color, you're going to take your darker color of the pair, and we're going to use that same little technique that we did in the rainbow lettering gradient, where we're going to take the tip of the pen and just lightly add in some blending or some shadowing. I'm just going to start. There is no rhyme or reason really to where I'm going to add this shadowing in, you'll see where I'm placing it as we go through. But I'm going to go in at the top of the letter, and I'm going to lightly add a little bit a darker color to the top of my lettering, trying to stay within the lines as best as possible. I'm going to do this. Wherever I feel that some natural shadowing should go, it's hard to pick it out, but wherever you put it, it's going to look really good. Let's do top and bottom. I'm going to move through the whole piece and do this for every letter, and then go back in to my third step. Now you can see you've added a little bit of shadowing in there, but it's not completely blended. That's why we're going to go back in with our lighter color and we're going to make sure all of this is blended out. Using your lighter color to blend things out, really makes it look super, natural, and the transition will look more smooth and even. You're just going to take the tip of your lighter color, gently trace over it, rub over it a couple of times, and then feel free to extend that lighter color down a little bit further into your lettering, because, go even going over your original lettering another time with that lighter color is going to create extra dimension and extra shadow. Now we're going to add in that three-dimensional factor that can only be achieved with the gray and the black pen out of the Fudenosuke pack. First things first, we're going to take our gray, we're starting again with our lighter of the two, and we're going to add a little shadow to the left of all of these letters. This can be once again tricky to figure out, where am I supposed to put the shadow? But I always say, to the left of the letters. I'm going to start over here. You're going to go out to the side. You're not going to trace on top of this letter, you're going to go directly to the side and you're going to add a shadow. I like to use my brush pen just the way it's intended, and I like to apply pressure on that down-stroke to make sure the thickness of the shadow actually matches the letter. Once again, I'm going to go inside of this L to the left, right here, and I'm going to add another shadow. It doesn't have to be precise, going to the left of this, the left of this inside. Feel free to follow along with me, if you're feeling a little bit confused on where the shadows are supposed to go. It can be somewhat confusing. But just pretend your light source is coming from this direction. You've got a lamp shining on these letters, and the shadows are going to fall to the left. I already messed up a little bit. Once again, this doesn't have to be precise. It's going to look really neat no matter what. Honestly, people aren't really going to know if you mess up on a couple of letters, I always do that. I still post things online that aren't totally correct and no one's ever said anything about it. Maybe they're just being nice, but I promise precision isn't the most important thing here. I'll speed this up and see you when we're done. After adding our gray, we just have one final step until this technique is complete, and that's to take our darker pen or black pen of the pair. We are going to add in yet another line of shadows that's going to bump this up and extra notch. Right where you've added your gray line, you are going to add a black line close to the letter. Just like that. Your gray is acting as the shadow that's extending outward, and your black line is showing how dark that shadow is close to that letter. It's just adding a little dimension to it and making it pop even more. I'll go ahead and speed this up and then we can see what it looks like once we're all done. Now we're done. You've added some really cool shadowing and shading to the letters that just takes it up a notch and makes it look super, super cool. I promise these are really easy techniques that are going to impress everybody you know when they see them. I can't wait to see what you have done with these class projects, to see your take on them, and your spin on them. I'm so excited, I hope that you've loved these. I have so much fun. I do these techniques all the time for fun, or to post online, or to make even thank you notes and greeting cards using these techniques. They are so easy, but they impress everyone.
7. Thanks for joining me!: Thank you so much for joining me for Lettering in Color. This is my first class on Skillshare, and I had so much fun teaching it, and I hope you've had even more fun taking the class. Don't forget that you can pick up everything I used in class today by checking out the resources list and the "About this Class" section of the page. And I also have that awesome 25 percent off discount code for Tombow. That's Kiley25 at check out. That's all listed below, so there's no excuse for you not to pick up some of your favorite things from class. And like I said, I want to see what you created, so definitely share it here on Skillshare, share it on Instagram, make sure to tag me at kileyinkentucky, tag Tombow at tombowusa, and use the hashtag fudenosukecolors so we can find you. Can't wait to see what you make. Bye.
Kiley Bennett, Artist + Online Educator
