How To Practice Brush Lettering

Under: Beginner Lettering Tutorials/By: Ximena

A lot of people have been asking what is the correct way of practicing brush lettering, lettering, calligraphy, or any form of lettering. Well, in this tutorial I am going to be talking about how perfect practice makes perfect.

First off the types of materials that you are going to have to use are essential. Second, sometimes you don’t need practice sheets but at first, you should be practicing the basic strokes. All of this I will be talking about in this post.

Here are just some things that I am going to be teaching you today:

Materials to practice lettering perfectly
Holding Brush Pen
Practicing the Basic Strokes
Practicing Letters
Additional tips

Materials For Lettering

Ok look I am going to be talking about materials because the only way you are going to achieve perfect practice makes perfect is by having the correct materials to do so.

First off…

BRUSH PENS

Brush pens are a very popular type of lettering tool that is out their. Well for beginners I recommend the Tombow Fudenosuke or the Tombow Dual Brush Pens.

If you are on a tight budget I would recommend regular Crayola markers work fine too.

Honestly, there is a variety of different Brush Pens so you could just choose one that you think that would best fit your needs.

PAPER

How many times I am going to go on and on about paper. I don’t know but this is very important when it comes to brush lettering.

This also sort of reminds me of watercolor because the paper can be more important than the actual watercolor at times. It is the same thing with brush lettering.

Of course, there is more of a balance between paper and pen but the paper still steps it up high for necessities.

The two things that you should always keep in mind when it comes to choosing your paper is that it is bleed proof and smooth.

Ok, you might understand why we need bleed proof paper but why do we need smooth paper.

YOU NEED SMOOTH PAPER because you could easily fray your brush pens if you have really textured paper leading for you to ruin them.

Here is a link to a review on paper for brush pens: Best Paper For Brush Pens

Here is a link to an article about fraying brush pens: Why Are Your Brush Pens Fraying

How To Hold A Brush Pen

If you want to get the perfect practice you are also going to need to know how to hold a brush pen.

You need to know how to hold it correctly so that you won’t fray your brush pens and it would be easier to create thin upstrokes and thick downstrokes when holding the pen correctly.

When holding the pen you should always hold it at a 45 degree angle. Never hold the pen upright (like you would hold a pencil), neither should you hold the brush pen that close to the paper.

45 DEGREES IS KEY

Practicing The Basic Strokes

When starting out as a beginner you should be just practicing over and over the basic strokes.

The basic strokes are brush lettering strokes used to form letters, words, and phrases. It is the very base of your lettering art.

A lot of times people just start practicing any form of lettering without learning the basic strokes which is the wrong thing to do. They just start to write in cursive with the thin and thick strokes.

That is soooo wrong.

Any way

The 7 basic strokes are:

Underturn
Overturn
Upstroke
Downstroke/Upstroke
Oval
Compound Curve
Ascending loop/Descending loop

Here is a link where at the end of the article I show you exactly what these 7 basic strokes are:

Once you have looked through that I would recommend just practice these over and over again.

You could take out your ruler and create some guidelines so that you could get it all down.

For this, you are aiming for consistency. You just want to make sure that every time you do any type of stroke it looks the same as all of the other strokes that you have done before.

This means all of your upstrokes are consistent, all of your oval strokes are consistent that is what you are aiming for.

Once you getting very consistent with your strokes I recommend starting forming letters with the strokes.

For example to form a lower case you are going to need a compound curve and an ascending loop.

Here is an example:

Practicing Letters

You have just finished practicing your basic strokes and now you want to move onto your letters. Like I said above you should be connecting all of your different strokes so that you can create letters.

Again when practicing all of your letters you should be aiming for consistency.

All of your a’s should look the same, all of your b’s should look the same and so and so forth.

Additional Tips

I am just be going to give you links to free practice sheets so that you won’t have to be going around looking for them.

Conclusion

Now you have just learned the correct way for practicing with your brush pens or any type of lettering art.

You have also learned that the paper is important when it comes to brush lettering and that you need to learn the basic strokes as a beginner.

Remember that perfect practice makes perfect.

How To Practice Brush Lettering