Building Lettering Confidence with Tombow and Tracing Paper 3

Hi everyone! It’s Mandy from A Heartened Calling and today I’m helping you boost your lettering confidence with something so simple: Tracing Paper!  Whether you’re just starting out with hand lettering, or are an intermediate artist, tracing paper can be a valuable tool.  It is smooth enough to protect all your precious Tombow pens and it’s affordable, which makes it perfect for all that practice.  So let’s see three ways you can use tracing paper with your Tombow pens!

Let’s gather what we need to get started:

MATERIALS

• Pad of Tracing Paper
• Tombow Dual Brush Pen in your favorite color
• Tombow Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen
• Tombow MONO Drawing Pencil 4B
• Worksheets downloaded from Tombow’s Website

CONFIDENCE BOOSTER #1 – WORKSHEETS!

Did you know you can find FREE lettering worksheets on Tombow’s website?  There are 7 different sets you can download for the Fudenosuke, Dual Brush and MONO Drawing Pens, so head there and print off whichever set you prefer (or all of them!).  Then simply place one of the worksheets underneath a piece of tracing paper.

Next use your Tombow pen of choice to trace the letters.  As you’ll see below, I chose the Fudenosuke Brush Pen and Dual Brush Pen worksheets. I also chose one of my absolute favorite Dual Brush Pen colors, Pink Punch (803).  Using tracing paper this way will make your worksheets last forever!

CONFIDENCE BOOSTER #2 – FLOURISHING!

Flourishing can be difficult to learn, but I promise you with lots of practice you will be creating beautiful flourishes! I highly recommend using a Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen, and even a MONO Drawing Pencil to practice with. The tracing paper is very smooth, which makes it feel like your pencil and pen are just gliding over the page.

Fill up an entire page of whatever flourishes come to mind. Even if they look like a big tangled mess, keep going! You’re aiming for practice, not perfection!  They may not come out like you had hoped, but seeing them on paper can help you see where you can make adjustments.  Use both the MONO Drawing Pencil and the Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen to practice with.

Here’s another tip: circle which flourishes you like the best on each of your filled pages with a Fudenosuke Color Brush Pen.  You can dedicate an entire pad of tracing paper to your flourishes and refer back to it when creating your compositions!

CONFIDENCE BOOSTER #3 – WORD DUMPS!

Word dumps are great for practicing. Simply letter what words come to your brain using different Tombow pens.  If you can’t think of any words, look around your room and letter out all the things you see. Or letter out your favorite foods, the names of people you know or TV character names, favorite restaurants, the list goes on and on! Filling up pages with random words gives you tons of practice!

And those are my three ways to boost your lettering confidence with Tombow pens and tracing paper.  I hope these confidence boosters help you in your hand lettering. Hand lettering takes time so don’t give up!  Keep going, you got this!

If you’d like to learn a few more lettering tips, pop over to this blog post!: Purposeful Lettering Practice

Happy practicing!

Till next time,

Mandy