Can Calligraphy Be Done With A Mechanical Pencil

So you are wanting to start the modern art of calligraphy but don’t exactly have the materials to do so.

Then you are finding yourself wondering can calligraphy be done with a mechanical pencil? 

Mechanical pencils are something that you can easily find at a dollar store and you would expect that you cant do calligraphy with it. That is totally wrong.

Right now I am going to give you the short answer to this question since I know you’re in a hurry here you go.

You can totally do calligraphy with a mechanical pencil. There are a couple of ways doing it as you will do with a regular pencil. Or another way can just by doing faux calligraphy.

If you are wanting to learn more about how to do lettering with a regular pencil check out my tutorial all about it here. 

Now let me give you a quick and short summary of what we are going to be learning today:

• First Way To Do Calligraphy With Mechanical Pencil
• Faux Calligraphy With Mechanical Pencil
• Cool ideas for Calligraphy With Mechanical Pencil
• Final Thoughts

First Way To Do Calligraphy With Mechanical Pencil

This first way of doing calligraphy with a mechanical pencil is very similar to brush lettering.

Well, they have the same basic concepts. More pressure the thicker pressure, less pressure the lighter stroke.

The thing with doing calligraphy this way is of course not a big difference in line weight.

Anyway, let us just go through the steps of this process of doing lettering with a pencil.

The very first thing you are going to learn is how are you going to hold a pencil.

So yeah you are going to have to learn how to hold your pencil in a different/certain way.

Instead of holding it upright, you would hold it at a little bit at an angle.

 
Let me show you what I mean.

After practicing that a couple of times now let us talk about our upstrokes and down strokes.

With our upstrokes, we are going to put less pressure but with our downstrokes, we are going to put a lot of pressure.

This will then lead to a difference in line weight.

Now start practicing your up and down strokes.

After that we need to learn how to transition between the two witch leads us to practice the basic strokes.

The basic strokes are just strokes that you can piece together to create your letters/words.

There are 8 basic strokes:

• Upstroke
• Downstroke
• Overturn
• Under turn
• Ascending Loop
• Descending Loop
• Oval
• Compound Curve

Here is a picture of the basic strokes.

I recommend that you practice these for some time until you are able to easily do it.

Now we are going to start learning how to form our letters.

For example, for the lettering, we need an ascending loop plus a compound curve.

Let me show you what I mean.

So you can now understand how you can use all of your basic strokes to form your letters correctly. I always notice a lot of people just using the formating of cursive instead of using the basic strokes

That just means you not doing correctly. 

Another thing I want to mention is that a lto fo people skip the basic strokes which is not good if you are barely starting out and have no idea how to illustrate a letter.

So just remember to practice your basic strokes.

Faux Calligraphy With A Mechanical Pencil

I have a more specific and in-depth tutorial on faux calligraphy here where I just go over the basics of this type of modern calligraphy.

Now let us talk about doing faux calligraphy with a regular mechanical pencil.

It is essentially the same thing as doing faux calligraphy with a regular pen. 

But first…

WHAT IS FAUX CALLIGRAPHY

Faux calligraphy is just a way of faking calligraphy, hence the name. It makes it seems like you used a dip pen or brush pen but really you are using a regular writing utensil. 

When you think about it it is quite cool.

Now how to do it…

FAUX CALLIGRAPHY TUTORIAL

The very first thing that we are going to want to do is write out our word, keeping the basic strokes in mind (something that I talked about in the previous section).

After writing out our word we are going to add a second line to all of our downstrokes.

Let me show you what I mean.

After doing that we are just going to fill in the space and there we go. An awesome calligraphy effect. You can, of course, do this with almost any type of writing utensil.

Some main differences from the previous way are that here we can get a bit different in line variation.

Depending on your style you either like that or you don’t.

But of course both ways are nice techniques and useful.

Cool Ideas 

Right now I am going to be going over some nice ideas for doing calligraphy with mechanical pencils.

Two Pencil Method

I found that this way of doing calligraphy with any type of pencil is actually quite interesting.

For this short tutorial, you are going to need…

• Two Pencils
• Rubber Band
• Of course Paper

Here we are going to grab our two pencils and with our rubber band wrap them together.

Now we can start doing calligraphy.

This is quite confusing so I was able to find an awesome youtube tutorial.

Shading

A cool way to adding a little flair to your lettering can just be by doing an ombre/ shading effect to your letters.

Basically we are going to do the faux calligraphy technique and instead of just blocking in color with the pencil.

Let me just show you what I mean.

Adding Cool Details

Here we are again going to be doing the faux calligraphy technique and not blocking in the color.

Instead, we are going to be adding some cool designs.

We can just do some lines or adding floral details. Whatever you think would look best.

Final Thoughts

So you have all just learned the very basics of doing calligraphy with a regular mechanical pencil.

You have also learned about some cool ideas and doing faux calligraphy.

If you are getting a little bit confused with doing the basic strokes check out my free printables and guide here.

Comment if you have any feedback or any modern calligraphy questions.