Brush Lettering - Getting better using deli paper

Brush lettering is very popular, but learning how to do it can be daunting. It was something I wanted to get better at, so I devised a method to not only improve my lettering skills but also be able to use my "practice" lettering in my journals.

My method is to trace over a printout of an alphabet or a lettering guidebook using semi-transparent deli paper, moving the deli paper around from letter to letter as I spell the word I want. The reason I use deli paper instead of actual tracing paper is that I've found many tracing papers are too absorbent and will blur and smudge your writing while the deli paper, which is designed to have some water resistance will keep your letters nice and crisp.

When you're using deli paper, you'll notice one side is slightly smoother and one is slightly rougher. Logic would dictate that the rough side would be the better side to write on (more absorbent, right?), but no - it's the other side that takes the ink better. When you're first writing on it you may not be able to tell the difference with your eye so try both sides and you'll see it right away.

So ... step one is to find some pens you like to write with. For brush lettering, you want a brush tip, which will be quite soft so you can get a good variety of thick and thin lines. In brush lettering, the UP strokes are thin and the DOWN strokes are thick. You need a pen that's going to be responsive to the amount of pressure you apply to get these variations.

As a beginner, you may want the variation to even be exaggerated so you can *really* see what a difference the pressure of your hand can make. I stumbled across a set of watercolour brushes in the children's toy aisle at my local drug store from Crayola that were pretty perfect for this:

Nice soft tips on these give you a great response to hand pressure.
The only downside I can see is that they're not refillable.

My next best recommendation is Tombow Dual Brush Markers. They have a slightly firmer brush tip at one end and a very firm, fine marker at the other end. I bought mine from Opus, and the set also came with a blender pen since these markers are very popular for use in the adult colouring book circle. They're not cheap, but they're very good quality. I bought a cheaper version of these and the brushes just did not hold up. You can also buy these pens in singles, so you can buy just one to test to see if it gives you the look you like.

Good quality, nice firm tips, and a wide range of colours.

For a cheaper alternative, and to write with REAL ink, in class we also played around with ink brush pens from Daiso (in Richmond). The ink is denser, but I've found the brush tip is not as responsive to hand pressure, so not the best pen for beginners because it takes so much more control to get that nice wide downstroke. But once you've got the hang of brush lettering, you may want to move on to these.

At $2.00 each, the Daiso pens are very affordable, but sadly not refillable.

There are MANY MANY brush pens to work with apart from these, so I encourage you to try whatever you can find. I've seen people create quite beautiful "brush" lettering with a regular Crayola marker just by putting some "tilt" on it as they write their downstrokes and you'd never guess it wasn't made with a real brush pen.

The next thing is to get some alphabets to trace. Let's start with the handouts from the class:

And two more sheets with the whole alphabet on it:

I created this sheet with stickers from a dollar store. First, I printed a sheet of lines on my computer, and then taped a piece of clear acetate over top, then I stuck the stickers on the clear top sheet creating my own practice sheet.

And one more, with some words I've done for you to practice on:

These are the ones that I brought to class printed out as books: Tombow has an excellent set of practice pages. I also like Amy Latta's One Artsy Mama's lettering practice sheets, and the Petit Planner has a nice set, too. There are many, many more. You can do a google search on Lettering Practice Sheets to find ones you like as well.

The nice thing about this method is that you can type out ANY font on your computer, print it out in a size you like and use it as a guide for whatever lettering you want to use, which is what I did below:

Now, to get on with the lettering! As I mentioned earlier, the UP strokes are thin and created by lifting your pen till just the very tip is touching. The DOWN strokes are thick and created by pressing DOWN on the brush pen, and sometimes (depending on firmness of the pen's nib) by tilting the brush so that more of it comes into contact with the paper during the downward motion.

Interestingly, the most overheard comment during class was that the people who wrote the original letters must have been "cheating" because a stroke that we might write moving the pen up or down in our natural writing was the opposite in brush lettering. The truth is that this kind of lettering can be a bit like proper calligraphy, in that sometimes you change the way you construct a letter to get the stroke width you want rather than how you'd write it if you were writing with a regular pen. The more you practice, the more you'll see how the letters are put together, and how the stroke width you want drives the motion your hand makes.

As I mentioned above, to use the deli paper to create words, I move it around on the alphabet I'm tracing to join up letters. In the photo series below, I'm writing the word Patience ...

Step by step I write out the word "Patience"

After I've lettered it the way I want, I glue the word to a piece of scrapbooking paper. This achieves two things: firstly, it gives the word a more colourful background than the plain, white deli paper, and at the same time, it "knocks back" the vibrancy of the background so the word remains readable. You might want to "audition" a few backgrounds before you choose one.

Gluing the word to vibrant scrapbooking paper (or any paper) gives it a colourful life, but still makes the word readable.

Sometimes I add more details around the border as well, like this:

When adding detail with a pen, you can enhance the existing pattern or create your own new details

We can then use these letter "practices" in our journal pages, as I did in one of our self portrait exercises from last year:

In this exercise, I asked people to write out five qualities that other people have used to describe them.

Here's another example of how doing your lettering on deli paper and then gluing it to a background can look:

I've got the quote above, and a few more you might want to practice with, on our last sheets of the handouts for this class:

And that, my dears, is the last class in the current series! But stay tuned ~ we'll be back in January!