I’ll admit, this week of #LoveYourLettering may be my favorite. Honestly, the soft tip brush pens are one of my absolute favorite lettering tools!

We’re going to ease into using a brush pen by starting in pencil.

Remember how using broad nib pens was all about the angle? Well, with a brush pen it’s all about the pressure.

When we practiced faux calligraphy I talked about adding weight to the downstroke. With the brush pen, adding pressure to your downstroke is going to produce those nice thick lines, while you release the pressure on the upstroke for the hairlines.

Using a pencil is a great way to take notice of the pressure without fear of ruining your brand new brush pens.

You’ll want to go slow so that you’re very intentional about your marks. On the upstroke you’ll barely drag the pencil across the page, then as you turn to go down you’ll press that pencil into the page. If you’re using a soft lead pencil (any of the ‘B’ series art pencils) you won’t have to press incredibly hard to get that dark line.

A companion guide is now available for this section of LoveYOUR Lettering click on the image:

As with all the other lettering styles we’ve covered, practicing basic strokes that appear in all the letters will help to define your finished writing.

Once you start to get the feel of varying the pressure of the down stroke try writing a sample alphabet, in print or cursive, putting to practice the pressure and release.

You can even do this exercise in colored pencil, but remember that those aren’t usually erasable.

I’m so excited for you all to try the brush pens this week.

Here’s our Periscope chat demonstrating this technique with pencils (and some brush pen tests).

These are the pens from Tombow that I’ll be using most often this week (Amazon affiliate links, please read my full disclosure statement here):

**You can find all of the previous assignments on the series index page here (or by clicking on the image above). A list of basic lettering supplies can be found in this post.**

More weekend practice!

Time to put all the techniques we covered this week into practice by writing out quotes. I love using pangrams, sentences that incorporate each letter of the alphabet.

Here’s my Pinterest board that I use to collect quotes.

Here are the pens I used most often this week (these are affiliate links, you can read my full disclosure statement here):

The Pilot Parallel pens in 1.5 and 2.4mm

The Zig calligraphy and EK calligraphy markers (these can be found at Target at lower prices.)

and the Zig Millenium pens

Are you ready to try brush lettering this week?

**You can find all of the previous assignments on the series index page here (or by clicking on the image above). A list of basic lettering supplies can be found in this post.**

Well, we’re caught up on topic, but one full week behind our tentative schedule. You all have been amazingly patient and your feedback throughout this series has been wonderful.

Let’s re-cap the last (two) week(s)…

We’ve been playing with calligraphy pens. Specifically, with broad-nib markers and pens.

It’s all about maintaining the angle with the pen tip.

How has it been going? Are you finding a comfortable groove?

I’ve added more inspiration to my lettering board on Pinterest.

Follow Lisa Walters (CreativLEI)’s board Lettering and Penmanship on Pinterest.

What are some inspiring lettering pins you’ve found? Add a link in the comments, or tag me on Pinterest.

Don’t worry about getting perfect italic letters, once you understand the importance of the angles you can get creative.

These two pages have lettering done with calligraphy and parallel pens(Amazon affiliate link, read my disclosure statement here).

Are you all caught up? Which assignment has been your favorite?

**You can find all of the previous assignments on the series index page here (or by clicking on the image above). A list of basic lettering supplies can be found in this post.**

Here’s one of the tips you’ve been waiting for to enhance your creative lettering, adding FLOURISHES!

Maybe you’ve been nervous to try flourishing your words because you weren’t sure what goes where.

That’s a completely valid concern. Flourishes that are misplaced end up adding chaos and confusion instead of beauty.

When I studied calligraphy, I was taught to use flourishes to compensate for spacing errors I made when creating layouts. With that in mind, the places you would make use of flourishes are, on the capital letters, on the ascenders or descenders, on the final letter of a word, or to reduce some of the negative space.

You can add flourishes using the calligraphy pen (just be sure that when your lines cross, that you avoid crossing thick with thick lines).

You can also make use of the fine tip pen to create loopy flourishes.

I like to allow the base of some letters to cross the base line, for added interest, especially the S’s!

If you don’t want to jump right into flourishing with ink, try using a pencil first to sketch out the possibilities.

These are really hard to explain in type, so here’s the update on  Periscope as well as a flourish demonstration!

It went a little long, so you may need to fast forward through parts.

**You can find all of the previous assignments on the series index page here (or by clicking on the image above). A list of basic lettering supplies can be found in this post.**