Creative Hand-Lettering Tutorials: Part II

In Part I of Creative Hand-Lettering Tutorials, I showed you how to create three eye-catching styles of hand-lettering. Today, I’ll be showing you a few more styles so you’ll have a veritable artillery when a lettering situation arises. And — make no mistake — a lettering situation is always around the corner! A birthday party {invitation design}, an overdue birthday card {card design, envelope}, a “just because” piece of snail mail, a poster … or perhaps you aspire to be the lettering equivalent of Banksy. Whatever the case may be, a little hand-lettering inspiration can never hurt! I’ll stop blabbering now so you can get to the good stuff. 😉

This ribbon-inspired style looks complicated, but when broken down into steps, it’s not difficult at all. To begin, draw a word in a cursive/calligraphy style using pencil. Don’t skimp on the flourishes! Any calligraphy style will work, especially if you make sure it has lots of nice, overlapping loops.

Next, use your pencil to draw lines parallel to the existing lines that comprise your word. Make sure you keep a consistent amount of space between the lines making up your word and the second line. I also added a couple of twists as well as ribbon tails on the ends.

Next, go over your pencil lines with ink.

Now, imagine that there’s a lamp shining directly over your ribbon. This will help you realize where shadows would occur. However, you really don’t need to be exact … the contrast that you get by drawing shadows anywhere will make your piece stand out! You can see that I have identified shadow areas below by shading with my pencil:

At this point, you’ll want to draw in the shadows. I’m going to use a dot technique to denote my shadows. In general, the part of the shadow that is closest to an object making a shadow will be darker, and the part of the shadow that is farthest from the source of the shadow will be light. To show this, you’ll want to make a few dots that are very close together right under your shadowy ribbons.

Supplement those dots with dots that are spaced at a medium distance from each other.

Finish up your shadow by drawing dots that are spaced far apart from each other, and gradually fade into nothing.

Here’s what the shadowed word will look like:

At this point, you can either be finished, or you can add some color. I chose to add in some yellow using a Sakura Glaze pen.

And voilà! An interesting lettering style with — literally — a twist.

The next lettering style I am going to show you utilizes shadows and negative space to depict visually intriguing letters. It was inspired by the talented artist Sasha Prood.

To begin, draw out a word in pencil using a standard print style. I am using Open Style from Learn Hand-Lettering for a Latté here. Notice that the letters need to be spaced relatively far apart!

Next, add lines to make the letters 3D. If you’re lost on how to do this, don’t worry! You need but only scroll down one more photo to be enlightened.

If you’re using the Open Style, here’s a cheat sheet as to what the letters will look like:

Once your 3D pencil lines are drawn, fill in just the 3D part with watercolor. Don’t color in the actual letter. To make an ombré/blended effect, use the watercolor technique I showed you in the Theo-inspired lettering in Part I.

Wait for your watercolor to dry completely, then erase your pencil lines. Once your pencil lines are erased, you’re finished!

This next hand-lettering tutorial also utilizes a watercolor ombré effect.

To create this style, draw your letters in pencil to begin. I have chosen to use Roman style print.

Use frisket or art masking fluid to paint around the letters. {For an explanation of how art masking fluid works, read the Easy Watercolor Tutorial post.}

When your masking fluid is dry {it will just be a minute or so}, brush a high concentrate of a watercolor tone to the bottom of each letter in a continuous brushstroke line. By “high concentrate”, I mean make sure there’s more paint on your brush than there is water.

Once you’ve painted in the bottom, add a medium concentrate of watercolor to the middle of the letters. It will blend right in to the darker color on the bottom.

Finally, add a low concentrate of watercolor to the top of the letter. It will blend right in to the top.

You may be wondering how to control the paint to water ratio when using watercolors. I find it easier to control when the watercolor paint I am using already has a bit of water in it. Basically, before I begin any watercolor project, I add a drop of water to the watercolor tone I wish to use.

To achieve the darkest tone of watercolor, then, I dip my dry brush directly in the watercolor pan. To achieve a middle tone, I dip a wet brush in the watercolor pan, taking care not to saturate it too much with paint. To get a light tone, I barely dip a wet brush in the watercolor pan. Once you understand this principle, ombré in general will be easier to create.

Once you’ve filled in your letters, wait for your watercolor to dry. Then remove the frisket or art masking fluid as described in the Easy Watercolor Art tutorial.

Once the art masking fluid is off, the piece is finished!

The last hand-lettering tutorial I am going to show you is very similar to the botanical letter that I wrote about last month. However, this letter utilizes henna, which is one of my favorite design motifs of all time!

You’ll begin by tracing around or free-handing a letter in the font of your choice in pencil. I chose to draw the letter “M” in a sans-serif font. {Read more about this step in the botanical letter tutorial.}

Next, start drawing a henna pattern inside the letter. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be able to pull a henna pattern/design out of your head {I can’t!}. My secret for drawing henna is Google Image Search. I simply Google “henna design”, and I combine elements from various photos I see to make my own, unique henna pattern.

I love using walnut ink for these types of letters because walnut ink is earthy and beautiful — like henna itself. Of course, you should feel free to use what writing utensil you have on hand!

Once you are finished with your pattern and erase your pencil lines, the letter is finished! Of course, you can make more than one letter, but since henna patterns are a bit time-consuming, I stick to one at a time. This would be a great design element to base a stationery set design around. You could also have a rubber stamp made featuring your design; simply upload it to rubberstamps.net to do so!

I hope you enjoyed Part II of Creative Hand-Lettering Tutorials! I love coming up with new ways to make words and letters stand out, so this was a really fun two-part series for me to create. I want to notify you, as well, that I will begin posting on Tuesdays and Fridays {vs. Wednesdays and Saturdays} starting next week. That means that subscribers will receive post emails on Wednesday mornings and Saturday mornings now {vs. Thursday mornings and Sunday mornings}. If you wish to subscribe to the blog, you can do so by clicking here. I decided to make this change so you will have all weekend to create Friday tutorials if you are so inclined!

Thanks very much for reading, and enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Warmly,