Beginner Hand Lettering Tutorial | 10 Things I Wish I Knew As A Beginner | Learn How To Hand Letter

hello friend in this video I want to share with you 10 things that I think would have been really nice to know when I was a beginner learning how to hand let her I've said it before but there are definitely some things I've learned to the hard way and I have no regrets because if I didn't I might not have thought to share them with you but regardless these 10 things are things that I think would have either saved me time or help me not be so frustrated when I was a beginner learning how to hand letter so I'm going to share those with you today I hope that some of these tips will help you to grow in your lettering skills so let's get right into the 10 things that would have been really nice to know as a beginner learning how to hand letter the first thing that would have been really nice to know was a beginner was the difference between up strokes and down strokes and which ones were supposed to be thick and which ones were supposed to be thin when I first started lettering I started with folk calligraphy which is where you write your letters and then you draw in your thicker strokes after but the problem is I wasn't sure which ones to thicken and which ones not to thicken I would just kind of guess and experiment and try to make it look good but there's actually a much simpler formula than that to put it simply when you draw down on the paper where the pen is coming towards your body that's a Down stroke and when the pen is going up on the paper or away from your body that's an upstroke one way to figure this out is by drawing your letters and then going back and adding arrows just to show which direction that you drew in you can do this all around the whole letter just so you have a really good visual you can kind of see how I've done this here in my simplified lettering beginner bundle that just kind of takes the guesswork out of it for you and helps you to figure out where to go with your pen so the down strokes which are the places where the arrow is going down are going to be thick and the up strokes which is where the arrows going back up are the ones that are going to be thin whether you're using a brush pen to achieve this look or Foe calligraphy the rules are still the same and it's much more simple than the trial and error that I was doing when I was a beginner if you don't have this simplified lettering beginner bundle and you'd like to check it out I will leave a discount code in the description box below for 20% off of your purchase and a link for you to grab them so the second thing is something that I think every beginner needs to know and that is that it's not necessary to know cursive to do hand lettering but I think it can help I get comments in questions sometimes from people who seem to either think that cursive as the same thing as hand lettering or that you have to know cursive in order to do hand lettering but that's not necessarily the case I personally call my own style more of a script style not traditional cursive because I don't follow all of the rules of cursive so yes a lot of my letters are connected and they kind of give a cursive like feel but oftentimes they're not sometimes I don't like the way two letters go together and I will just leave them separated or I will use a print letter mixed in with my script style and that's one of the things that makes cursive and hand lettering different another thing that's different that you can see in my example is that on the top or the cursive wine I didn't lift up my pen the entire line except for to add dots and cross bars and that meant that I backtracked on strokes sometimes but with hand lettering I lift up my pen after almost every single stroke but when it comes to hand lettering I believe that you don't have to follow a specific set of rules or exact way of writing a specific letter you can change it up depending on what your style is now that being said I do think that cursive can help you to solidify your letter formation before jumping into worrying about thick and thin strokes so let me add a little bonus tip here I think that people underestimate the importance of letter formation but in my opinion having good letter formation be kind of a second nature to you is really important for learning brush lettering because the thing is adding thick strokes to our letters and using a brush pen can kind of feel unnatural at first if we're trying to learn thick and thin strokes while we're also trying to learn how to use a new pen well we're also trying to master a script alphabet it can feel a little bit like learning a bunch of new things all at the same time and that's hard that can feel overwhelming and make it difficult to focus on what we're doing since we aren't struggling with just one thing but multiple I really think that having a solid script alphabet is underrated and I think it's a great idea to develop one before jumping into lettering using a brush pen the Aloise is my mono script alphabet and if you haven't seen it there's a lot of pages included and I know that practice and repetition isn't like a super fun answer I know that you would all probably prefer a video of three tips to letter without practicing or something like that but I just don't have that my style came with tons of practice and that's why I include so many practice sheets I'll talk more about practice later but if you have not solidified your a mono line script alphabet I will leave a link below for the Eloise in case you're interested just check the description box below for a code and a link the third thing that would have been really nice to know when I was beginning to learn how to hand let her is that you don't need a fancy angled grid to learn hand lettering earlier on in my brush lettering journey I started to look online to find any hand lettering tutorials honestly there wasn't much there because it was a little bit before online video tutorials got really popular and it was also kind of before hand lettering started to get popular so the videos that I did find were creating these elaborate grids or guides using a ruler and it just looks super difficult to me as a beginner sometimes when I get overwhelmed with things as a beginner I just simply don't start and well there's certainly nothing wrong with exact angles in your hand lettering if you're like me and that overwhelms you I just want you to know that it's okay you can start learning hand lettering without that now if you're looking for perfect angles maybe that's something you're interested in but for me I honestly don't think I even attempted to create that because it looked kind of overwhelming and in turn I just ended up lettering freehand on paper but if you've ever tried hand lettering on just a blank piece of paper it can be really hard to draw straight and not go up in an angle so there's an in-between it's not bad to let her freehand but it would have been nice to have a really simple guide to help me keep things even and keep my proportions right you can use a grid paper to help you letter but if you don't want to purchase anything like that I will just upload a few of my favorite blank lined pages to the free resource library on my website the lines with the dashes are my preference because then I can use them with my favorite paper instead of spending money on buying a fancier paper I also have a really upright writing style so this just works really well for me the resource library is totally free just look under the hand lettering section once you're in the library for the grids and there are some other hand lettering printables there as well if you're interested you can find that at how to hand letter comm slash resource library or again I will link it below it's somewhat new so I'm still adding things to it but you can definitely keep checking back for more free printables to help you with your hand lettering the fourth thing that would have been really nice to know as a beginner is that tracing really can help when I first opened my Etsy shop there weren't a lot of options for hand lettering worksheets so that's not really the way that I learned I had developed a style just over a lot of practice and changing things up and you can still see that in my earlier videos on this channel but then something happened I created a simplified style of alphabet and I was really intentional about trying to make it specifically beginner-friendly now I wasn't a beginner at the time but when I created the worksheets at my own lettering style changed big time it became more upright more even more simplistic and I loved it and I realized that because I hand draw my worksheets I kind of naturally ended up tracing over my own lettering a lot you can't I will leave a link for some old videos if you want to see what my lettering looked like before I created this set and after but I almost feel like I'm a product of my own product and that's what really makes me feel like this would have saved me a lot of time if I knew this earlier I just think the repetition of creating the same strokes and letters over and over and over built muscle memory and to me it kind of now just feels like second nature the fourth thing that would have been really nice to know as a beginner and then I'm also kind of afraid to say is that pens are not that big of a deal so okay if you've been around here for any amount of time you have probably gotten a feel for the fact that I have a lot of pens but here's the thing before I started this channel I only had a few I buy a lot of pens in hopes that I can help you guys figure out what works for you and equally what won't work for you so you can save your money but the reality is that for practicing your hand lettering there are so many brush pen options but so many of them look really similar yes it's fun to have a bit of a variety but I don't think you need that to learn hand lettering now yes it's true there are differences some are big some are small some are more vibrant some have different color options some are available in certain locations and not another's but when it comes to actual brush pens that function and work well and that I mean they don't just get smashed when you push down on them because those don't work and those are different but for brush pens that work you really don't need a ton of different options to practice and learn hand lettering now in this clip you can see multiple different brush pens all of them I use all of them I love but they really do create a similar style and look of lettering I'm not even sure that many people could pick out which ones are which if they didn't see the part where I'm lettering with them so yes if you love pens go for it I am NOT here to judge anyone's love for pens but my point in sharing this is to make it clear if you think that spending more money on more expensive pens or different types of pens will equal you having better hand lettering for the most part I don't think that's true it's about technique and it's about practice and just a little bit about your brush pen which leads me to number 6 which is actually kind of the flipside of number 5 while I may not think that your pen matters all that much I do think that your paper does I like a smooth paper my personal go-to is HP premium paper and that's not because it's better than marker paper but it is very smooth and also very inexpensive in comparison to many others it's basically I think kind of a high-end printer paper and I think it's a great introduction or go-to paper for brush lettering but I also love marker paper I'm using that a lot in this video here you can see a side-by-side between mixed media paper and a marker paper notebook that I have well the look is a bit different what really matters to me is the feel the mixed-media paper is textured and really can do a good bit of damage to those brush pens the marker paper however feels amazing and is a joy to write on that being said there are lots of options and when you get into more specific types of lettering testing out some specialty papers may be something that you want to try here are a few that I have and different ones are good for different things let me know in the comments below if you'd like to see a comparison video between different papers but if you're curious now I do have a page on my website where I have some different tips and information about papers that I recommend you can bind that page at how to hand lettered calm slash paper the seventh thing that I think beginners need to know is that lettering videos are often very sped up now there are videos like this one where it's sped up by eight times and you might be thinking well that's really obvious I can tell that it's sped up but there are videos where lettering might be sped up only to two times or four times the speed and sometimes those videos are a little harder to tell and it can be easy to assume that they're in real time just for comparison's sake here's a video of my lettering in real time versus the same clip sped up to two times is it obvious I don't really think so and now it's sped up to four times this one might be a bit more obvious but maybe not and I would say for me personally it's not uncommon for me to speed up my videos to at least four times when posting on Instagram simply because Instagram has a one minute time limit and it's hard for me to get out much more than a few letters in a minute when I'm writing in real time so if you've been watching lettering videos and trying to create that lettering along with them maybe see if slowing down will help and if that feels hard for you one way to try and slow down is to lift up your brush pen in between every stroke now I do this pretty much naturally you may not always notice because it's just a little pickup in between strokes but in this clip I exaggerated this for you and it's hopefully a bit more clear to you how often I pick up my pen doing this can help me slow down to a reset and to make sure my strokes are evenly spaced if you haven't tried it I would recommend at least giving it a chance the 8th thing that I think beginners should know is that you can always change your style in fact I probably always will my style has changed multiple times even since starting this channel a few years ago and that's okay that's part of the fun of lettering so if you feel like you're struggling with the basic strokes or getting things even you're not alone just try to work on getting those basics down and trust the process knowing that your lettering will probably change and that you have plenty of time to make tweaks to your style I think there's always room to grow a ninth thing that would have been really nice to know as a beginner is that you can make money from your hand lettering and it's not just by selling art prints when I first started to feel like I should share my lettering with more than just my notebook I started selling things like art prints and hand lettered goods and don't get me wrong that's great and if you love that that's amazing but I didn't love it I did love making the products I loved creating the ideas I loved coming up with new concepts all the shipping and packaging and things that go with product based business it just didn't really work for me in my life so why was I doing it well I didn't really realize all of the ways that you could earn an income with hand lettering I just saw a lot of people selling mugs and art prints and I thought that must be how you make your money lettering by selling mugs and art prints but here's the thing now I do earn money through hand lettering and it comes in several different forms but none of those ways are selling art prints if you're interested in learning more about making money through your hand lettering I have a free training where I share my own personal story with you about the mistakes that I made when starting my business and how you can hopefully skip some of those mistakes it's just a four video series that won't take a ton of your time and if you're interested I will leave the link in the description box below or if you're ready to learn more about ways that you can earn money through hand lettering I will link my business course called your unique income in the description box below it's only twenty-seven dollars I made it super affordable because it's specifically for beginners and it's packed full of tips and ways to earn money in a way that works for you I won't go home for too long but you can go to bit ly slash your unique income to see all of the modules that are included in this course and see if it's right for you the last thing that I think every beginner should know is that no one can practice your lettering for you yes I will try to create tons of resources for you and tutorials and share with you my tips and tricks and behind the scenes that I simply can't practice for you and for most of us lettering takes practice it's all part of the journey I hope you enjoy it and I hope that this video was really helpful for you make sure to find me on Instagram how to hand letter if you're not there already and if you haven't already gone through my free seven-day hand lettering mini course I would highly recommend jumping into that today you can join for free at how to hand lettered comm slash mini course thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in my next one

Channel: How to Hand Letter

Views: 1,672,514

Rating: 4.9479423 out of 5

Keywords: learn hand lettering, learn handlettering, hand lettering tips, hand lettering tricks, how to handletter, hand lettering for beginners, handlettering for beginners, beginner hand lettering tutorial, calligraphy tutorial, beginner calligraphy tutorial, basics of handlettering, basic rules of handlettering, beginner brush lettering, calligraphy for beginners, calligraphy and handlettering for beginners, modern calligraphy, hand lettering, handlettering, suzy grace

Id: UKUkSWxNJFc

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020