Best Way To Practice Cursive Lettering - Free Practice Sheet included

practice makes perfect well i'm sure you've heard this a thousand times and uh heck i say it all the time but just how do you practice something to get really good at it now that's a great question in this video i'm gonna be showing you how to practice your crystal lettering and how you can do it at home really easily hey what's up legends stephen codes here with an awesome way to practice your cursive lettering i know that a lot of tutorials are often bland now i wanted to spice things up and this is why i got these three different hot sauces from 5 out of 10 to 9 out of 10 all the way up to 12 out of 10. i know that doesn't make any sense so i've divided this tutorial in three steps for every step i'll start off with taking a little bit of hot sauce just to keep things interesting so in this tutorial we'll start off with what tools you'll need for this practice then setting up the guidelines and helplines to draw awesome alphabets then drawing the alphabet skeleton finally adding some weight and then i'll show you how you can even put this into a weekly practice routine so here's what you'll need a pencil a pen an eraser and a lot of paper and if you struggle with drawing straight lines you can also use a ruler so first we're going to take a shot of this hot sauce so i have here my breadsticks peri-peri edgy for the nearly break so this is the shot that we'll take here is the breadstick dip and eat fun actually perry step number one setting up the guidelines let's first prepare our blank piece of paper by adding four help lines starting off with the baseline so this is the baseline parallel to that line will be the x height so that will be the second line down space them too far apart as you will have to draw the letters in between these then we'll add the ascender line which is the one where the stems go all the way up so that one will be a little bit traced like this here baseline the x height and the center and descender line you can repeat this throughout the whole piece by the time this video goes live i'll have a sheet ready for you that you can download and print at home so you can go here and use the link or go to the description below and use the link to the blog so the first two lines the lines that we've drawn in full are the most important ones so the ascender and descender line are optional you do not necessarily need them but they are also really practical repeat this until you have filled out the page don't worry if the lines are not perfectly straight parallel or equally spaced you can actually add inclination guidelines so if you have more letters that are inclined like a metallic form will always be have an inclination then you can kind of add these lines just to help you to keep the same slant slant is the right word for this one moving on to step number two the nine out of ten hotness sauce oh mama hot and gasping it's not too bad just out of caution let's get some milk in and a 9 out of 10. okay now i feel the kickback okay it's getting hotter let's try it without milk first starting to sweat a little bit step number two skeleton letters so the full practice is actually done in two parts so we'll start first with the skeleton letters so the first part of the exercise focuses on the letter form itself we'll be writing the entire alphabet but all in a single stroke this is great to practice your consistency and also your spacing of each single individual letter so let's start off with just one little incline style of lettering not too fancy so i'm starting off here with the letter a trying to keep the shape of every single letter about the same once i'm done with one line i can just jump down to the next line and keep on going still trying to keep up the same slant the same shape size w x y z i think i got them all you can do this in different form and shape so you can fill out one page with one type of alphabet but then you can move on and then create a different style of alphabet so for example drawing them larger apart or creating them more round and straight or you can do them more edgy and narrow so as you can see there are a ton of different variations of skeletons as you can create so there's not just one that you have to fill out but you can also create them on different levels so for example to keep them on a different baseline which is more of a brush calligraphy style a lot of different possibilities keep on creating try to draw the whole alphabet and the full alphabet out so that you have a starting point where you can start off with if you want to reuse these sheets and don't have to redraw the whole alphabet you can also just copy them because in the next part of the exercise we are going to use this type of alphabet all right time for step number three hot sauce number three and also the hottest one out of them all crazy hot this might be the part that you will understand the least because i might be fighting more the heat than anything else it's very hard to concentrate now step number three adding weight all right now that we have the skeleton let's add some weight to every single litter we'll cover three different styles in this tutorial number one is traditional contrast the second one is mono weight and the last one is an inverse contrast which i use a lot of time in my lettering okay let's look at the first style so this is the normal contrast the traditional contrast so what i'll do is to actually draw inside the contrast in the letter forms itself the skeleton of the letters actually helped me to really just keep those same shapes but just adding the weight this is odd so i'm drawing inside of the letter outside and however to try to fix and add the the letter shape and as i go on i keep on filling out these letters i feel this is one of the most important rules in lettering calligraphy and type design but unfortunately one that i learned pretty light so the down strokes are thick and the up strokes are thin side note for this reason it's actually important to know exactly how a letter is drawn in which way because that will affect which lines are thick and which lines are actually eighty percent of you will do it mostly correctly so don't worry about it too much but it's worth actually going it over it once to see which lines you have to draw in which way i'm sweating all over here so with a pencil we'll start drawing the in and out line to increase the weight an easy trick to make everything consistent is to not just draw out the inlines and outlines but also creating a lot of different lines in between so instead of drawing a u this way and and draw the inlines and outlines like this it's hard to notice whether or not these lines have the same thickness the same width an easy trick to make everything more consistent is to add multiple lines closer together in order to make it easier to nail the thickness every single time apply this style to all other letters of your alphabet that way you'll practice how to apply a style weight to every single letter so style number two is mono weight mono means single and so everything has the same thickness over the entire letter so it's basically the opposite of contrast but you can define the thickness of the letters yourself it can therefore be thin as the line you've already drawn or you can make it really thick so that the gaps in between are super small some of the lines will actually be closer together to appear as if they were all the same style or the same thickness we start in the same way as before adding the weights by drawing outlines here and there to achieve the mono weight effect don't be afraid of not getting it perfect this is a practice exercise so we start in the same way as before adding weight by drawing outlines in and outside of the letters so i'm starting here with the j and i've decided to go with a minor thickness also another style element is to decide whether or not the letters are edgy so in this case here i decide that the j here should be edgy and not rounded so the endings of those lines will always be at an edge in this case here i don't like the k and so i kind of want to make sure that it's a straight end and therefore i have to make some adjustments to the letter k and change the skeleton just to make sure that it all works together i could also do the same thing with the l so i can erase what i've done already and also mimic the same style and adjust these lines what i would probably do in the next step would be to get these lines closer together and so that's something that i can always adapt in the next version that i create write down some notes about what you can improve in the next version and then work on that with every single practice round you do so one of my favorite styles and i guess i can say also one of my signature styles is the inverse contrast type style and this is how you can achieve it instead of adding out the weight on the down strokes we're adding the weight at the top and the bottom of every single letter and here's the trick first you'll draw a narrow tall letter and you'll add a smaller wider letter together so let's apply this on each letter we just drew so in this case here i'm starting off with the r i'm starting off here wider and drawing it in a smaller way and going the same thing with the s where i draw a smaller s here i'll go out but i'll draw the t a little bit smaller i usually start filling out very soon so i can see the style that i'm creating and try to repeat that don't forget always go over it again try to make some minor adjustments try to make it more consistent if it looks wrong try to do it differently until it looks right your intuition will guide you and will not fail you this video has been brought to you by sabido the pen brand that has been supporting me for the last three to four years now i'm only able to create content like this for you guys for free because of brands like them who are supporting me who are paying my bills so if you want to support me support them and you can buy their awesome products linked in the description below so congrats you just finished three different styles which is amazing now it's time for you to create and put it into a practice routine and this is how i would suggest you to do it on monday the first day of the week you start with drawing five to six different skeleton versions then on the next day take one of these alphabets and then start adding weight adding weight to a full alphabet will take enough time and be just enough for a good practice that you can do every single day repeat this exercise every day until saturday and then start again the next week thank you so much for watching why don't you hit the like button if you learned something new share with someone and help them get better subscribe to this channel right now turn on the notification bell and i'll see you in the next one i'm gonna drink the rest oh oh well if this didn't spice things up i don't know what will

Channel: Stefan Kunz

Views: 11,538

Keywords: best way to practice cursive lettering, calligraphy practice for beginners, how to improve cursive letters, lettering for beginners, lettering advice, hand lettering tutorial for beginners, hand lettering practice sheets pdf, drawing letters styles, cursive writing, calligraphy for beginners with pencil, calligraphy alphabet, lettering alphabet, stefan kunz lettering, stefan kunz, lettering styles, lettering, easy lettering tutorial, lettering with pencil

Id: UaXXiwWTHgw

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020