In this workshop tutorial, you’ll learn directly from the illustrator of the Jesus Calling Hand Lettering Coloring Book on how to work on your hand lettering skills! Learn about your hand strokes, what kinds of lines you can make, and how to accomplish this with various pens. Enjoy!
Artist’s Tutorial Transcription
Setting Up Your Hand Lettering Practice
One of the best things you can do when you start out hand lettering, is practice your strokes. There are two main ones that you’ll want to get really good at. The first one is your up stroke, and the second one is your down stroke. I actually found this really great free worksheet, that you can download from ThePostmansKnock.com. It’s the perfect thing to get you started.
Practicing Pen Strokes
Here I am practicing my down strokes, which requires harder pressure. And then my up strokes, where I pull the pen up and use lighter pressure. Once you get really good at these strokes, you can play around with lines that use both techniques.
I like to experiment with different pens. Some of the pens I use provide really thick words and lines. And then some of them are thinner like this one [1:20].
One of the great things about this worksheet is that it includes an alphabet. You can copy and practice all of the letters. It comes in both upper case and lower case.
Up Strokes, Down Strokes, and Horizontal
Don’t forget to push really hard when you go down on your down strokes. And pull up the pen using really light pressure. As light as you can get on the skinny up strokes. These strokes also work, say if you do a line that goes across a capital “H”.
Once you do this a couple of times, you’ll be really surprised at how much better that you get.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever was told, is to practice lettering just a little bit a day. Even if you make yourself do this for about five minutes every day, don’t miss a day, and you’ll notice a great improvement in your work.
For more hand lettering tutorials, pick up your copy of the Jesus Calling Hand Lettering book today.
