Some of the best creations come out of inspiration but also if you practice enough you can make something spectacular.  When you have a few moments to spare from your busy daily routines, grab a cuppa, some  paper, a pen and a pencil and have a play with words and letter styles. You will probably surprise yourself at how good you can become.   Take inspiration from the world around you including TV advertisements, magazines, newspapers, anywhere that has text. You could even keep a small note book with you to note down different inspiring moments of letter styles and  techniques.  I hope our brief examples will start you off to a road of new handwriting techniques (bumpy roads are good too as you will see in our examples!)  But most of all have fun and enjoy!

Try writing out a sentiment or statement such as ‘Happy Birthday’ but start with all SMALL CAPITALS

And again with LARGE CAPITALS

Then try alternating between and mixing upper and lower case letters

Now imagine that these mixed up letters are on a bumpy road and randomly have some higher and some lower

Now try other examples such as slanting your letters to give a quirkiness

Try slanting again with CAPITALS too

Now based on the slanted letters try adding a small ball to the ends of the letters

Next try perfectly straightening your letters

Then curling some of the ‘tails’

Working towards a text which some tend to call ‘real writing’

Now that you have had a practice of different styles of writing, we are now to add a bit more dimension to your letters. We will do this by ‘fattening’ up each letter, then adding colour by varying mediums and finally shading.  These next examples show only a few ideas to kick-start your creative MOJO. Give it a try – we would love to see your finished examples too.

First of all, take a pencil and draw out the text how you would like it.  As you are using a pencil, any mistakes can easily be erased.

When you are happy with the letters, go over the pencil with a permanent black pen. The pen should be permanent so that it does not smudge the ink when you rub out the pencil lines.

Next add a bit of colour. We have used some coloured pencils to give a more pastel look to the letters. However, two contrasting colours have been used on each individual letter.

The letters have been ‘filled in’ for this example with a black glaze pen and a shadow effect has been created with a contrasting pink glitter pen.

Here two contrasting colours have also been used alternating between each letter. The pens used are purple metallic and blue glitter.

Finally contrasting colours have been used with watercolour pencils, along with a grey shadow effect. Once activated with a water brush, this gives a great effect of 3D lettering.

Here is another example of hand-drawn text which has been glazed with Glossy Accents, shown as words to embellish an ‘Envelope Baby Bag’.

Don’t miss our next feature on Doodling, coming soon!

Tags | 3D, alpha, Alphabets, doodling, glaze pen, Glossy Accents, hand-drawn, letter styles, letters, pen, pencil, real writing, Tracey Grundy, words