New Challenge: Hand Lettering

      14 Comments on New Challenge: Hand Lettering

Last year I decided to start keeping a Bullet Journal which was one of my resolutions for 2017 actually it was quite successful and I have just started my new bullet journal for this year. =)

My nan got me an A5 dotted Leuchtturm1917 journal in Azure for my Christmas present this year and I am loving it so far =)

Brand new bullet journal

But I really am not a big fan of how my handwriting looks when I try and do fancy headers or big text. For the everyday writing it looks okay (most of the time) but I’d really like to be able to do some more fancy lettering. This was something that I had talked a bit about last year and so another of my Christmas presents was some Calligraphy supplies, including a book and a starter Calligraphy and inks sets =)

I am super excited to get started trying some of those out, although I will have to wait a little while as it was left behind to save space in my car coming back from Christmas, so I don’t have it with me at the moment. =(

In the meantime I am planning on getting started with some hand-lettering using normal pens and brush pens.

I have just purchased a few supplies for this, a Pentel touch brush pen and a Tombow Fudenosuke brush pen. I found these recommended as beginner pens on a Youtube channel and from my initial use I think they will be quite good to learn how to do some hand lettering.

I have also decided that I will use the Elephant book that I was gifted in my Stitchingsanta to practice my lettering in as it is portable so can go with my journal and has pretty good quality paper in it.

My supplies for hand lettering

My supplies for hand lettering

 

So what exactly am I going to do with this challenge?

Well from a bit of Youtube watching it seems like the best way to get started with lettering is just do practice anything, whether it’s doing some drills to practice the different shapes used in lettering or writing out words or phrases, just getting writing is the key.

So I want to try and get some form of hand-lettering done everyday for at least 30 days. 

Now I hope I will be able to accomplish this… I know there are a few days where I will be busy all day so I might have to do two sessions on the previous or next day, but otherwise I will try to take 10-15mins minimum to do a bit of lettering. I will also try to post up photos of it on Instagram with a follow up post at the end of the challenge – so follow me (knightcrafts) on there if you haven’t already =)

30 day hand lettering challenge

 

What will I do for the practice?

So there are lots of different drills and types of writing that are out there… soooo many in fact. I am going to try and find some practice sheets with different shapes and movements as training my hand to do the movements will be important. I will also try faux calligraphy which uses normal pens and colours in the down strokes (this is useful to learn which parts of the letters are the down and up strokes). I also want to try writing out a few nice quotes or sentences to try practicing words and more showy writing styles.

If I actually enjoy this and improve I hope to be able to use hand-lettering in my bullet journal for nice headers and page spreads as you see all over instagram. I definitely need to remember not to compare myself to the photos on the internet though otherwise I will never get anywhere.

 

Has anyone else tried out hand-lettering? Any advice from your experience?

 

Nikki

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14 thoughts on “New Challenge: Hand Lettering

  1. Dartmoor Yarns

    My handwriting is appalling, but I’m afraid practising any kind of writing sounds far to much like school to me. Calligraphy is beautiful though so I look forward to seeing your progress.

    As for bullet journals – I know they’re all the rage, but the explanations I’ve seen of them makes them seem like an over complicated way of writing bullet lists – so what would you say bullet journaling give you above and beyond just writing an ordinary bullet list? Sorry if I’m sounding excessively negative, don’t mean to, just curious.

    Reply
    1. Nikki Post author

      Oh my handwriting definitely isn’t amazing, and I have tried multiple times to teach myself how to write with my right hand (I’m a lefty) but it looks like the scribbles of a child… Hopefully this time I might be able to get something that I’m happy with 🙂

      So there are quite a lot of crazyily complicated bullet journal layouts out there. Mine definitely isn’t that complex. You can do all sorts of collections and things but I don’t use it for that. I basically use it as a freeform planner. At the the start I have a year at a glance and a few other things like birthdays etc. Then for each month I have a spread for what’s going on that month and things i need to do, then maybe a tracker if I’m trying to remember to do some habits. Then each week I might have an overview of the week (if I can be bothered) and then i have my daily sections. These have food plan, events, tasks, and memories of the day. I can put as much or little into it as I feel like for the day. My one is mainly daily lists but I find it much better than having to-do lists scattered all around everywhere, and i don’t feel guilty if i miss a few days which i might if it was a dated planner.

      Wow that was a long comment… I might write a post about it at some point as I tried a number of different planners before I settled on this one. It still evolves as I use it though. 🙂

      Reply
    1. Nikki Post author

      Well I’m a complete beginner to this but I did find a few useful youtube videos i think it was howtohandletter – but I have picked up a couple of brush pens to experiment with which fron first use i think are easier than nibs and inks (unless maybe you normally use fountain pens). So i got the tombow fudenosuke pens and a pentel touch brush (this one needs to be the brush one and not the normal felt tip) which are quite nice so far 🙂 they are definitely for smaller lettering though. I think I might potentially do a couple of blog posts about this at some point.

      Reply
  2. tialys

    I got a starter calligraphy set a couple of Christmases ago but it’s all still in the box :/ I love seeing beautiful handwriting and mine has got worse over the years through lack of use. I’ll be watching your progress with interest – although only when you post about it as I don’t visit IGland much.

    Reply
    1. Nikki Post author

      Aww that’s a shame, i definitely don’t write as much as I used to, but I’m hoping that I can try to improve mine a bit and make a few pretty lettering designs.

      I will definitely try to do a couple of progress posts on here!

      Reply
  3. Rainbow Junkie

    I started doing calligraphy at school and carried it on for years till I discovered Computer fonts that of course are perfect. My writing was really bad but the effort involved in calligraphy did improve it. I used italic pens (dip ones first and later fountain pens) with different nib sizes and always used lines to control the height of different parts of the letters. I especially liked Old English / Black letter fancy script. You can get italic pens for left handers.

    Reply
    1. Nikki Post author

      Unfortunately I’ve never really been taught any fancy writing, but I do agree computer fonts are very useful!! I hope this might improve my writing somewhat. I might have to look into italic pens, so far I have one dip pen that came with a starter set, but it seems pretty standard.

      Reply
  4. sewchet

    My handwriting is quite flowery in style anyway, so I am drawn to ‘fancy’ lettering and Calligraphy. It’ll be fascinating to see how you get on.

    Reply
    1. Nikki Post author

      I don’t think I can class my handwriting as flowery at all… but I am quite enjoying the lettering I have done so far. I do need to come up with things to write though, at the moment it is just random words.

      Reply
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