Brushing up on my hand lettering

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Hi all,

I’m excited to see that Spring has finally arrived – the sky is blue (today anyway), the Sun keeps popping its head out and the daffodils in my garden are starting to open up. I even have washing on the line which is actually getting a little drier than when it went out. Yes, the clocks went forward a few weeks ago, but the weather certainly wasn’t matching with my expectations and I found the dull, cloudy, dark and dismal days providing me with little motivation to do anything!

But, hopefully now, with a little sunshine and a lot more light, we can all feel happier, more awake and ready to meet our goals and challenges each day. We can also spend some much needed time outside, perhaps getting some gardening done or going for breezy walks in local parks and countryside without the need to thermals and a woollen hat and scarf.

One of my goals for 2018 is to work on my brush lettering and get to the stage where I can form all letters and their swirly bits from memory without having to copy from the various alphabets I have pinned up in my craft room and get my script flowing and looking neat and generally impressive. Over the past few months, I’ve been practising almost every day using the tutorials and worksheets from Destination Decoration, click here to find out more. After a while, I felt confident enough to try out some words and have been adding bits of brush lettering in my planner and my journals. Then I decided it was time to try out doing longer pieces of writing in the form of motivational quotes. And, as luck would have it, on this very day, my friend Michelle Webb posted a link to some fantastic worksheets on her Facebook wall. They’re by Dawn Nicole Designs and are absolutely free to download. You can find a wealth of her awesome hand lettering stuff here.

The worksheets are printed on my old Epson deskjet which I’ve had for years but is still going strong. I used lovely thick paper Navigator 120gsm which I seem to recall I picked up from Wilkinsons. It’s really smooth and there’s no bleed through with my Tombow Fudenosuke hard tip pen.

I also decided to make a simple background using my cheap watercolours which I picked up a few months ago from Tiger. The paper wasn’t particularly wonderful for this and I found that if I worked it with the brush too much it kind of developed bobbles on the surface (I’m sure there’s a more technical term for this – please enlighten me if you know!).

I used some crinkle cut scissors to add a bit more interest and double sided tape to stick the quote down. I’m quite pleased with my first attempts but there’s definitely plenty of room for improvement. I have lots more quotes left to do – I think there’s about 11 pages worth in total.

What do you think? Are you currently working on your hand lettering and what have you found to be the most useful resources for learning?