How To Do Calligraphy Without A Pen

So you are wanting to get into modern calligraphy or hand lettering but you are on a tight budget and can’t afford any pens. 

Well, right now I am going to be showing exactly what you can do if you are on a tight budget and wanting to get into the art of lettering. 

If you are wanting to get into lettering but on a budget here is what you can do.

• Do Calligraphy With Regular Crayola Markers
• Learn To Use A Pencil For Calligraphy
• Use A regular Old Pen

Those were just somethings that you can do and I am about to build off on those ideas and explain how you are able to do calligraphy without calligraphy pens or brush pens.

 Now, this is just a brief summary of what you are going to be learning today:

• How To Do Calligraphy With Pencil
• How To Do Faux Calligraphy
• Using Crayola Markers For Calligraphy

In this article, I am mostly dedicating it to learning how to do calligraphy with a pencil, and there will be links for the rest of the things that I talk about today.

How To Do Calligraphy With A Pencil

You might be wondering wait you can do Calligraphy with a pencil. Well of course you can. I am going to be just sharing two techniques on how to go about doing this.

• Using Two Pencils
• Using A regular Pencil

Let’s get started…

Using a regular old pencil to do calligraphy is quite easy. Like with all different types of calligraphy, upstrokes are thin and down strokes are thick.

The first thing I am wanting to say is it is not the same thing as holding a regular pen or pencil. You should be holding your pencil more at an angle, not upright like you would usually do.

Another misconception is that you just do regular cursive with the thin upstrokes and the thick upstrokes. That is not true calligraphy is formatted in a different way. 

You format your calligraphy by using the basic strokes, which are:

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

Here is a picture of what these strokes are.

These strokes are then used to then form your letters in calligraphy. Without these strokes, you may be doing calligraphy wrong.

But now let us learn how to do them…

Like I have explained above, start out by holding your pencil a little bit at an angle.

Now, whenever we are going down we are going to apply pressure to our pencil. Now when we go up we are going to apply less pressure to our pencil.

This then leads to line variation. Of course, your downstrokes won’t be as thick as if you were doing it with a brush pen, but there is still line variation.

Now start switching between the two, this will then help you learn the basic strokes. Before even practicing letters you should practice the basic strokes.

After mastering this you can now move onto forming your letters. The basic strokes, as seen above, can form almost every letter in the lowercase alphabet.

Once you got down your letters start practicing forming your words and developing your own style of lettering.

Doing calligraphy with a pencil is a great way to start off, especially if you are intimidated by other types of calligraphy tools.

Essentially a dip pen and brush pen are quite similar to the pencil. The more pressure the thicker the stroke is going to be. You could say a pencil is just training wheels and later on, you can do calligraphy with other fun tools.

But pencil calligraphy is also considered a whole entire art form. Doing calligraphy with a pencil doesn’t just have to be for practice but also for final projects.

If you are wanting to learn a little bit more about how to do pencil calligraphy and taking it to the next level these are two other tutorials that I have created:

• How To Do Calligraphy With A Mechanical Pencil
• How To Calligraphy With A Colored Pencil

The Next technique is…

You are going to need two pencils and an elastic for this type of technique. First, you are going to want to take the two pencils and wrap the elastic band around them.

I would still recommend holding it at an angle as I explained in the above tutorial.

Writing with these two pencils in hand will get you a nice effect that looks like you outlined your calligraphy or that you are adding shading to your letters.

This is a great way if you want to quickly write out something and make it look like you used a special calligraphy tool. This requires no pressure sensitivity since you have two pencils.

If this was a bit too hard for you here is a video that I was able to find that can help you out.

How To Do Faux Calligraphy

Faux calligraphy is just a technique that makes it look like you used a brush pen or dip pen to do calligraphy. When really you used an ordinary ballpoint pen.

For this quick tutorial, you need to know the basic strokes which I talked about above.

You are going to first write out your word how you would when using a calligraphy tool, but without line variation.

Once you got your design down you are going to want to grab your pen and with all of the downstrokes just create a line. 

You could either leave it like this (because it looks quite cool) or you can block in the space or create a nice pattern.

Here you are going to be getting an effect without needing a calligraphy tool or brush pen.

I have actually done a full tutorial just talking about this technique. If you are interested click here.

How To Do Calligraphy With Crayola Markers

You may be wondering you could do brush lettering with Crayola Markers? Well, right now I am going to be showing you exactly how to do that.

This is also very similar to the first technique that I have talked about. You are going to want to hold your Marker at a 45-degree angle to your paper. When doing your upstrokes you are putting light pressure. While with downstrokes you are going to put more pressure.

This will create a really big comparison with the downstrokes and the upstrokes. Again you are going to also want to practice the basic calligraphy strokes. 

I would also recommend using Crayola Super Tips because they are quite easier to hold. The other fun thing is you can do it with highlighters or similar felt tip markers.

Here is an example of a word that I illustrated very quickly with Crayola markers.

This was just a snippet of another tutorial that I have done (which you can check out here) on exactly how you can start learning lettering with Crayola markers.

Conclusion

Now you have learned how to do lettering/calligraphy without using expensive art supplies if you are on a really tight budget. 

Of course, there is a lot of other techniques that you can do to get the same effect without using a brush pen or calligraphy pen. 

These were just a few that I have done in the past. The fun thing with these techniques is you probably have all of these supplies at home.

Have some more questions?

Feel free to comment.