Creative Lettering Mini Tutorial

Hand-lettered titles and journaling have become one of the newest trends in scrapbooking. It's kind of ironic that so many new products on the market, stickers, rub-ons and rubber stamps for instance, imitate the look of hand-drawn images.

Not everyone is blessed with beautiful handwriting but I'm going to share some technical and creative tips that will improve your lettering by leaps and bounds.

1. Plan your lettering in advance. Even though it looks carefree and unplanned, most people who do their titles and journaling by hand plan it well. This includes drawing guidelines very faintly with pencil and measuring so the placement is correct.
   
   
2. Keep the style of lettering consistent with the theme of the layout. For example, my diet layout's lettering is much more rigid than that of my layout, "Wild Woman," shown below. One is a serious topic and the other is more fun and playful.
   
   
3. Pre-writing in pencil first is a great way to boost your confidence. Draw everything in pencil until the desired effect is achieved and then trace over the lettering lines with a fine tip marker or ink pen. Any stray pencil marks can be erased afterwards.
   
   
4. Do the lettering on smaller pieces of paper that will be attached to the background paper. This is less intimidating for beginners. This way, if mistakes are made, it's no big deal or expense to start over.
   
   
5. Find lettering ideas by looking through the fonts that you have saved on your computer. For example I styled the title and journaling on my "Wild Woman" layout as a mixture of two fonts in my collection. I borrowed the serifs of one and mixed it with the curvy, loopy lines of the other.
   
   
6. Practice makes perfect. I say this all the time to my art kids at school. The more you do, the better you will get.
   
   
7. Make sure you have the right tools for the job you want to do. My favorite fine tip and brush markers are by Pitt and I love Zig's calligraphy markers. Experiment with what you have before buying new because you might have the perfect supplies already in your collection.

Hopefully I've convinced you to give hand-lettering a try for yourself. Be sure to share your efforts.