5 Exercises to Improve Your Hand Lettering 4

Hi friends, Adrienne from @studio80design here to show you five exercises to improve your hand lettering! Whether you’re experienced or new to hand lettering, these exercises will help you gain better hand strength and pen control!

Tools you’ll need:

• Tombow MONO Drawing Pencil
• Tombow Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen
• Tombow Fudenosuke Soft Tip Brush Pen
• Tombow Fudenosuke Colors
• Tombow Dual Brush Pens
• Tombow MONO Eraser
• Smooth Paper

1. Pressure Practice

The first exercise is to practice your pressure. Pressure is important in hand lettering because it allows you to achieve those beautiful thick and thin lines! Use the Tombow Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen to practice downstrokes and upstrokes on a smooth piece of paper. Push hard as your hand moves down the page and push light as your hand moves up the page. Doing pressure practice like this will train your hand to create thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes when it comes time to create letters!

2. Basic Shapes

Basic shapes are known as warm-ups for hand lettering! All of the basic shapes or a combination of shapes make up almost every letter of the alphabet. The entrance, under turn, overturn oval, complex curve, descending loop, and ascending loop all make up the basic shapes. Practice them over and over again to get a hang of all these shapes. I love using the Fudenosuke Colors Brush Pens to practice basic shapes, using a different color for each shape!

3. Pencil Practice

Did you know pencils are great tools to practice your hand lettering? The third exercise is to practice with a pencil! Use the MONO Drawing Pencil to practice your letters. Use softer lead pencils, like 4B or 6B, so you can practice different line weights.

4. Alphabet

The fourth exercise is to practice the alphabet…over and over again! Fill up pages of alphabets and practice letter connections between the letters as you go! Use the Fudenosuke Soft Tip Brush Pen to practice the alphabet. It had a softer tip than the Fudenosuke Hard Tip Brush Pen, so it’s more flexible and creates larger downstroke lines.

5. Composition

Once you’ve mastered all the letters, it’s time to practice composition! Lettering the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a great exercise to practice your composition because it contains every letter of the alphabet.

Use the Tombow MONO Drawing Pencil to sketch out the composition on your paper. Make the composition fun and interesting on your paper. Then use a Dual Brush Pen to hand letter the phrase and the MONO Eraser to erase the pencil lines underneath.

Thanks for visiting, I hope you give these five exercises a try! Make sure to follow me @studio80design for more tips and inspiration like this!

Check out these posts about handlettering:

• 5 P’s of Brush Calligraphy and Hand Lettering
• Blended Lettering with Dual Brush Pens
• Stitched Lettering Tutorial