5 Tips for Starting Brush Lettering
When I was learning to letter I did a lot of brush lettering, both with ink and paintbrush, and with brush pens. Starting with brush lettering helps you learn the way letters are supposed to look before you get too deep into hand lettering and drawing them from scratch.
I’ll go into the anatomy of type in a later post but for now, I want to focus on brush lettering because I believe everyone is capable if you take the time to learn. Here are five tips for when you’re just starting out with brush lettering.
Hold your pen at an angle
While most of us do naturally hold our pens while writing at an angle, those of you who are more vertical writers will need to start teaching yourselves to tilt a bit. Everyone has their own perfect angle and although I didn’t get the protractor out (not sure I still own one now) I tend to hold mine at around 30 degrees off the page. It really does depend on your hands, the pen you’re using, and how thick you want your downstrokes.
Put pressure on the downstrokes
This is how you get that iconic brush lettering look. While writing you want to put pressure on the pen when going downwards and relieve the pressure when going upwards. This gives your letters natural-looking thickness and thinness in all the right places or as Meghan Trainor puts it “all the right junk in all the right places”. You’ll soon learn what looks right and what doesn’t, which if you’re wanting to move onto hand lettering is exactly what you need!
Take it slow, but not too slow
Going too fast usually makes your lettering look messy, but going too slow with certain brush pens can stop them flowing nicely and end up with jagged looking lettering. What you need is the happy medium which does differ from pen to pen but doesn’t take too much effort to get the hang of.
Draw guidelines
If you can’t write straight, take out a pencil and draw yourself some straight lines to follow. Brush lettering allows itself to be a bit bouncy but if every letter of your word is on a different baseline then something is not right. If you’re wanting the bouncy look, draw two baselines 1-2cm apart depending on your pen nib size and practice alternating each letter to the two baselines.
Keep at it
My biggest tip for anyone starting any sort of hobby is stick to it! You may not be excellent at the start, gosh you should see my first attempts, but if you keep at it and continue practising then you’ll get better. Trust me! If you need help on random words or phrases to letter then have a look at lettering challenges on Instagram, I used a lot of the #brushletterpracticechallenge prompts when I started learning. Take it slow and start with singular words before trying to letter an entire quote. You’ll get there - you’ll be writing beautiful quotes in no time!
- Sophie
A shorter version of this article appeared in December’s Newsletter. Not everything in the newsletters end up being reposted on here so make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss out on even more creative content!
Pin for later!
If you found this useful be sure to share it to Pinterest to come back later, and so others can find it too! Use the Pinterest save button by hovering over the image below.
