
Explore a casual lettering approach for urban sketching and journaling that uses your own handwriting, without memorized styles. Create visually interesting letters with pencil, marker, and watercolor.
Explore essential supplies for laid-back lettering, from watercolor and fine-tip water brushes to waterproof pens, erasers, rulers, and watercolor paper, all using tools you already own.
Begin by drawing a straight line in pencil with a clear ruler, mark the center, use a bottom line with top guidelines, and count spaces as letters to plan spacing.
Learn watercolor lettering with a water brush, lifting pencil guidelines and letting colors flow into organic bubble letters. Explore rainy-day palettes like shadow violet to create layered, expressive capitals.
Create two handwriting-based styles using your own handwriting, including tall, skinny letters and Toscani letters with left-side thickening, not following a formal script.
Transform round letters into square shapes with a waterproof pigment liner, then apply watercolor with a water brush for a loose, layered, gesture-based lettering style.
Attached is a sample typeface you could use for this lesson. Also, here's a Pinterest board of lettering styles that inspire me. Feel free to try these out or search for your own.
https://www.pinterest.com/drunkenbotanist/hand-lettering-for-urban-sketching/
Explore expressive sketchbook writing with personal handwriting, bold lettering, and on-page notes, combining images and text, lists, vocab, and memories from travel and daily life.
If you want to add more artistic, colorful, dramatic lettering to your sketchbooks, journals, and artwork, but you don't want to put in the hours it takes to really perfect a hand-lettering style, this class is for you!
I love all the beautiful brush pen and modern calligraphy styles I see all over Instagram, but filling out practice sheets and trying to learn upstrokes and downstrokes felt too much like work for me.
So I developed an approach to lettering that I could do without a ton of practice, using more or less my own handwriting and the art supplies I already carry with me.
In this class, I’ll show you how to work with pencil, pen, marker, and watercolor to create visually interesting letters using the same approach to drawing and painting you already use in your art.
I’ll work from examples of the styles I like to use, that fit my personality and my artwork, but I’ll also show you how to find the styles that work for your tastes and interests.