Ever since I can remember I’ve loved beautiful handwritten notes.
So you’ll understand my excitement when typography guru and self confessed font fanatic Gemma O’Brien (aka Mrs Eaves), offered to give us a lesson in hand lettering. Gemma rocketed to fame 5 years ago as a uni student with her viral youtube video Write Here, Write Now and has built, in just a few short years, an impressive body of work including hand drawn pieces for Canon (a favorite of mine) and Woolworths as well as a huge number of other creative projects such as developing the masthead for Peppermint Magazine, refreshing the title sequence for children’s tv show Playschool and designing 80th birthday invitations for ex-aussie Prime Minister Bob Hawke (see more of her work here). Today she’s going to show us the basics of hand lettering by making an exquisite hand drawn card – perfect for a friend or lover. Take it away Gemma!
Cast your mind back to primary school cursive practice and the quest to acquire your pen licence. Unless it’s a shopping list or a quick scribble… the hand written word seems to be a dying art these days. Lettering is different to calligraphy – it’s more like “drawing” letters – as opposed to creating them through the strokes of a nib or quill. For this reason, it’s quite accessible to all. You don’t need special tools … just a little practice. Once you’ve mastered your own style you’ll be beautifying the labels on your storage boxes and making hand lettered cards for every occasion.
Today, we are going to create a small card to accompany a bunch of flowers…with hand lettering that will read “Happy Days!”.
How to
Step 1
Make a trip to your local art store or newsagency and gather a few supplies. You will need some nice paper with a bit of texture (watercolour paper can be quite good or Mi Tentes has a beautiful selection of cream and pastel papers available in A4 sheets), a 2B pencil, rubber, ruler and a variety of thicknesses of fine black markers… and of course some flowers.
Step 2
Select the size of card you wish to work with. My card is going to be A5 folded in half.
Step 3
Let’s start by drawing some guidelines just to help give our lettering a bit of loose structure. Eventually, after practice, you can draw the lettering freely without guidelines but initially its a good way to maintain consistency and balance to your work.
We are going to draw a baseline (this is the line upon which the letters sit), an x-height(this is the height of the body of the lowercase letters) , a cap height (the height of the capitals) and a stress guide line (this is an angled guide that you can use to give your lettering a certain degree of slant.) If you wish to do a little more background research into the anatomy of letters you can find a great source here. Make sure these guidelines you are drawing are quite faint so you can easily rub them off later.
Step 4
Once you have your guidelines in pencil you can roughly sketch you your letter shapes. Do not be disheartened if they don’t look great immediately. I think for this particular tutorial I wrote out “Happy Days” at least 20 times before I felt happy with it! Let the rhythm of your hand dictate the flow and start by simply drawing the “skeleton” of the lettering. It’s often helpful to look at existing examples of cursive and scripts. They can vary quite dramatically. Sometimes you can luck out and find some old books about scripts in second hand stores otherwise online font foundries have a wealth of reference and inspiration – check out this one.
Step 5
After you are happy with the shape of you pencil skeleton you can start to add width with the strokes. This is where looking at reference comes in handy. Because you are “drawing” in the stroke width (rather than letting pressure or a brush stroke define it) it is helpful to look at examples of calligraphy and fonts to see where the contrasting thick and thins exist. While it’s important to keep the thicknesses relatively consistent across all letters, the nature of hand lettering is that there is always an element of human error… sometimes little mistakes can add character and interest. Once again … practice…practice … practice.
Step 6
Lastly, trace over your sketch with one of the fine black pens and rub away the pencil with an eraser. If you’re working at a small scale like this it’s good to have 0.05 – 0.8 pens on hand. If working at large sizes using a brush pen or brush and ink is more appropriate. Now punch a hole in your card, and tie it to your flowers with a piece of twine…. Happy Days!
Make sure you stay up to date with Gemma’s day to day on her blog, and for those of you living in Australia, Gemma hosts Hand Lettering workshops all around Australia – sign me up!
Wonderful tip. I’m planning my next DIY and this is what I need.
Thx again
kisses
Ewelina & Eva
dublinchiclifestyle.blogspot.com
Great to hear! 🙂
Calligraphy is so beautiful. Thanks for this post, I want to try this out!
The Occasional Indulgence
I know right. and I love that this project is super simple and you don’t have to be a master calligrapher to give it a go. x
this is such a cute DIY! Love the card, it came out so good 🙂
I know right?
Aaaah G this is such a good idea, and nice cards are SO expensive these days – what a nice alternative and really personal. xxx
South Molton St Style
I know! You pay at least a fiver for a nice card and Gemma has shown us it’s totally possible to make one yourself – score!
Thanks so much for this post and explaining everything! Inspired to try this out for my upcoming wedding stationery! 🙂
Gemma has taken all the confusion out of hand lettering and shown how easy it is – couldn’t be happier!
[…] recently asked me to create a DIY lettering tutorial for her readers. You can check out the results here and maybe even have a crack at making a ”Happy Days” card yourself. If you would […]
This is amazing can’t wait to try it out!
http://www.beblacknblue.blogspot.co.uk
http://www.bloglovin.com
Yay!
These notes are really beautiful! Thanks for sharing this DIY. I have spent quite a bit of time perfecting how I write…but this really makes it a lot more easier to approach!
I couldn’t agree more, I love it.
Lovely! I love getting hand made cards, it always makes it so much more special.
http://www.queenofmayhem.com
http://www.queenofmayhem.com
Totally, even if they aren’t perfect they mean so much more than store bought ones.
This is such a fab guide! Thanks. Love the idea and the walk through guide to follow. xx
I know right? I’m working on a few as we speak. x
I was always envious in school watching graphic designers do typography. I love this quick tutorial!
Michelle
http://www.michelleesque.com
Me too – totally proves that you can pick up a new skill easily 🙂
terrific tutorial! i have recently gotten really into customizing stationary and this would be an awesome way to do so 🙂 thanks!
Great to hear!
I can’t believe it! “Write here, right now” is blocked in the US. Haven’t seen that too often before.
OMG really? Gemma writes all over her body in pen – it’s amazing!
Oh gosh I wish I had nice hand writing! As a graphic designer I spend too much time designing typography on screen, as opposed to creating it by hand. Fashionably beautiful!
I bet you totally have the skills though!
I really wish I did. I love hand drawn illustrations and typography, but I feel more in control of a mouse rather than a pencil these days. Will definitely give this ago though 🙂
Great DIY
Good for mother’s day too!
thanks for sharing!: D
xoxo, Jules
♥Come Visit My Blog♥
I love typography and all things hand made especially when they are done well. There is just way too much talent out there!
I shall try this! It looks like fun 😀
Perfect timing! My love’s birthday is coming up. And I LOVE making cards… even though my handwriting is horrible. This will help! I hope!
this is awesome! it looks so professional
Awesome tutorial. Always wanted to be able to write beautiful notes like that!
Anyway, I saw this clear belt: http://karenzambos.com/store/item.php?item_id=625&category_id=50
and totally thought this looks like something you would like. Would love to see your take on it.
Amazing post! if you want go to my blog:)
http://asunshineoffashion.blogspot.it/
LOVE this! An easy way to make your own cards. Would love it if you visited my site, http://www.thesobremesa.com !
Love this post! One of my goals before my next birthday is to practice hand lettering often. Reading this gets me super motivated and inspired to really follow through. I need to get me some of those pens!
Those are lovely~ I remember learning calligraphy back in highschool, but never as fancy as this! This gave me wounderful ideas for writting birthday cards as such <3
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IT’S GREAT!!! where did you buy the book?
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Hiya, do you also have tutorials on how to transfer hand lettering to illustrator / photoshop to colour it and such? Thanks, Anna
This is just beautiful.
I was wondering if anyone out there new of any fab books or further tutorials on hand lettering. Practice makes perfect so I’d love to learn more and practice and come up with my own style.
Thanks
This is amazing, I’ve been wanting to get into hand lettering so bad!
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AWESOME blog post! Thank you so much for this!
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I am impressive your handwritten beautiful handwriting
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I love this and hope you will see it and respospond as I have several questions. I love the first design you did with the grid. How did you know how tomake your grip. I guess it is the placement of how you want your text to be/ I have been lettering since this past summer and what can I say…a fling turned in to love and I am hooked. I need lots of practice thought. Oh you say whatercolor paper? Which kind? I plan to watercolor my detters and some drawings to accompany my words. Thanks again. Your wiork is beautiful and I signed of for email of course. Wish I was in Austrailia to take a course…
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perfect
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I love your explanation of the stress lines! I’m dabbling in hand lettering and am just practicing different fonts and getting a feel for the strokes but I can’t wait to start doing bigger things with it. Do you use the ink pot and pen/brush much? Is it hard to get the hang of?
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I got a great idea to begin my handlettering adventure with my Christmas cards. I found your informative website, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Beautiful post, and a great tutorial for anyone wanting to make their own handmade cards. Sharing simple tutorials is a great way to inspire others to add more art and creativity to their days. Great! 🙂
Hellooooo! That’s really helpful, because I’m newbie and really excited with lettering 🙂
Big thanksssss :))
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Love this
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Hello, I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a bit, but other than that, this is great blog. Nice
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Perfect timing! My love’s birthday is coming up. And I LOVE making
cards… even though my handwriting is horrible. This will help! I hope! http://simulasi-kredit.com