Brush Lettering Tips: 5 Techniques to Instantly Improve Your Lettering
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I’ve been brush lettering for years now, but I know it can be daunting to a beginner, so here are a few brush lettering tips to get you started!
Beginning Brush Lettering
When you’re new to brush lettering and full of excitement, you are ready to jump right in and begin. But once you put your brush pen to paper for the first time, you’ll realize that this is harder than it looks. Brush pens are hard to control, your hand isn’t doing the right movements, and it’s just not turning out like you hoped. This can be super frustrating. So how do you get past it? After lettering for many years now, I’ve come to realize that there are a few techniques that can help you overcome these obstacles and get to lettering the way you want. Here are my top brush lettering tips to get you on the road to lettering success and improve your lettering quickly.
Using Brush Pens for Lettering
Before I get into the techniques, I need to talk turkey about the pens. You can’t do brush lettering with any old pen – it must be a brush lettering pen (although you can create a faux lettering look with whatever you have on hand). There are a bunch of brush pens out on the market, but I started where lots of people start – the Tombow Dual Brush Pens. I like these because they are reasonably priced and come in enough colors to keep me busy for a while. I also love the fact that they don’t bleed through the paper of my Leuchtturm. There’s a little bit of ghosting, but it’s really quite subtle. That’s a huge plus for me.
These Tombows are a great first set, but there are tons of other options. Each pen has its own feel, personality, and abilities. You might be surprised which pen becomes your favorite. Here is a post to help you find the brush pens that are right for you.
Brush Lettering Tips
Understand Pressure
The first thing you need to know is that pressure control changes everything in brush lettering. When you apply pressure at the right points, you can create a beautiful, flowing piece of lettering art. Brush pens make this possible with a single stroke. Since they have flexible nibs, you can create heavy and light lines in the same stroke to achieve this look.
A normal pen, however, can’t achieve line weight variation easily. If you go over your lettering again and manually thicken up the lines like in faux calligraphy, you can still create some line variation. But a brush pen, once you learn how to control it, can do it much faster and more intuitively.
Lettering that has no variation in line weight is called monoline lettering. This is a great type of hand lettering, but it isn’t what we’re trying to achieve in brush lettering. So you need to understand how to use pressure to your advantage while lettering.
The Ups and Downs
Ok, so you understand that you need to apply pressure in your lettering. But how do you know where to apply more pressure or less? Thankfully, there is one simple rule that will help you kick your lettering into the next gear.
Apply heavy pressure on downstrokes and light pressure on upstrokes. Downstrokes are the strokes that you pull the pen toward your body and upstrokes are, predictably, the strokes that you push up and away from yourself.
Practice the Rule
Now I will admit that this is easier said than done. Brush pens are very foreign and strange to write with at first. They might not always do what you want them to do because they are so different from anything else you’ve ever written with. But with time and practice, you will figure out your brush pens and know how to bend them to your will.
To apply the pressure rule to your lettering, you need to start thinking about upstrokes and downstrokes. We don’t usually think about the direction of our strokes — we just do them. But the next time you are writing, slow down and pay attention to where your strokes are going. Then try it with brush lettering and pay attention to the pressure.
The best way to get the hang of heavy downstrokes and light upstrokes is to practice slowly and deliberately. Drills like the ones I have for free in my Fox Den Resource Library are an excellent way to practice applying the pressure in the right places. Sign up here to get it now!
Here’s how you use it: download your worksheet and print it out. Then use a brush pen and slowly letter over the guides. Just once won’t do it — in fact, drills are perfect warmups before you sit down to letter anything.
Create a Clean Transition
As you’re practicing your upstrokes and downstrokes, it is important to try for a clean transition between two weights. This is a tough thing for newbies to learn, but it’s important to having a great lettering product. One of the tells of a new letterer is a sloppy transition between thick and thin. Make sure as you practice to go slowly and work on creating a clean break between the two strokes. It will be hard at first, but if you focus on this detail, you will grow your skill by leaps and bounds.
Play with the pressure
Once you start to get used to applying pressure in the right places, you’ll see huge improvements in your lettering. But there’s more to it! You can change the thickness of heavy downstrokes to completely change up the style of your lettering. You can make the weight difference small or gigantic for a totally different effect. Try playing around with the amount of pressure and see what kind of lettering styles you create!
Practice These Brush Lettering Tips
The world of brush lettering has a ton of techniques and tips to learn. But once you master this foundational set of brush lettering techniques, everything you make will look much more advanced. Focusing on these techniques might not be as glamorous as learning fun flourishes or shading, but getting these details ironed out will have a huge impact on the rest of your lettering skills. So practice, experiment, and work on these skills. I promise that if you throw yourself at mastering pressure, the rest of the lettering world will open up to you.
Thank you! I’m a lefty and I still have a lot of trouble holding my pen to get the correct up and down strokes. Any tips?
As a righty, I’m afraid I don’t have any firsthand experience on the challenges a lefty faces while lettering. However, JetPens has created a video with five tips for lefty letterers that you might find helpful! https://youtu.be/Qo0NWre1-6I
Shelby….
The worksheets have two colors… dark grey and light grey…why the dufferebce
I’m not seeing the difference you’re talking about! On my end, the drills are all the same color grey. Either way, just use them as a guide to letter overtop and get a feel for the shape!
Thank you for sharing your tips.
You’re so welcome Terry!
Honestly I still have problem for writing some letter such as “S”, “F”, and “Z”. I download some worksheets but it still feels awkward for me and pretty hard to find my own “style” so that I can write better. But thanks for some tips abt two-tone method, I always thought to go with darker pen first.
Keep at it Fai! You will get it down with continued practice.
I would to try this technique
You definitely should Rufina!
Oh my I love it!!! I love nice writing I hope to learn it!!
Thank you Priscilla! You can absolutely learn how to do it too.
I was given some brush pens for Christmas. They are a brand I’ve never heard of. I’m wondering if they are not very good pens because no matter how hard or light I push, the line is the same width. The pens do have a fine tip on the other end, so I used the fine tip to create the lighter lines. That looked disconnected. Should I be able to create both thick and thin lines using the brush tip?
That’s strange to hear, Leigh! I’ve never had a brush pen that refused to flex. What brand are they, if you don’t mind me asking? A brush pen ought to be able to give you both thick and thin lines.
It may help you to hold your brush markers at about a 45 degree angle. Play around and find an angle where when you write lightly, only the tip touches the paper, but when you press downward the side of the brush collapses and touches the paper making a wider line. This is hard to explain, but if you hold your brush marker too close to straight up and down, when you press down, your line won’t get appreciably wider. Even worse, you will fray the tip of the brushes so that they make fuzzy lines. Then the brushes may be useful for water painting type art, but they will work well for lettering,
I am wondering whether you have Aenart dual brush pens. I bought some on Amazon around Christmas time. I also bought one large Tombow brush pen. I feel as though the cheaper pens are softer and a bit harder to control than the Tombow, but they do work.
I’m trying to learn how to do this lettering. I have the Tombow brushes and well, let’s just say I have a long way to go! I’d like to learn more about spacing and ‘bouncing’ my letters. do you have a tutorial or worksheet (or formula!) for these?
Everyone starts somewhere! And don’t worry, progress comes pretty quickly. I don’t have a super in-depth technique tutorial, but my Beginner Brush Lettering post might be able to help! Keep at the practice and you will get better in no time flat!
My handwriting is horrible, but I watch all those videos of people effortlessly writing and creating works of art and I’m jealous. I just bought my first set of Tombows and I’m determined to improve. Thanks again for all your advice.
It can be hard to start when you see all the people who are so advanced. But you have just the right attitude to get into it! You might also be interested in my post about how to improve your day-to-day handwriting. I’m sure you’ll be cranking out some fantastic lettering in no time! It happens a lot faster than you realize!
love the lettering!! Tottally helps my handwriting! Love it!! Thanks so much!!
I’m so glad you enjoyed it and found it useful! Thanks for reading! 🙂
I would love to try your techniques to improve my lettering. I love journaling and I think using the brush lettering technique would really be the pop I’m looking for to start Bullet Journaling. We have an awesome link up that I believe your tips here would be great for. Come join us at http://slapdashmom.com/bujo-mojo-week-1/
I bet you would have a ton of fun playing with lettering! And excellent blog, I’ll definitely need to pop in again sometime!