Episode 40

Hello, dears!

Unfortunately I couldn’t make my Art Lab post on Friday, but I have time (and data XD) to do it today! In this post I’ll show you a few tips and tricks on lettering, plus show you plenty of font inspiration to copy or use to think up your own fonts. (Because I usually run out of ideas after, like, three fonts. XD) So. Ready? GO!

Technique: Hand Lettering

Hand lettering is super fun, and also very useful for when you want to spiff up an envelope or gift tag or any number of things.

Fonts

Let’s start with one of my the most common and prettiest fonts in handlettering: fake calligraphy. Lovely name, isn’t it? 😛 That’s because it allows you to get a calligraphy-like effect without using any special calligraphy tools. It’s also super simple to write. See?

Step One: Write out your desired words in the neatest cursive you can.

Step Two: Find the downstrokes. Downstrokes are the places in a letter where you move your pen down the paper, like the little pink arrows show in the picture.

Step Three: Widen and color in the downstrokes to get the look of a calligraphy pen. Ta-daa! Pretty, isn’t it?

This is a great base font, especially when paired with a simple sans or serif.

So basically sans doesn’t have the little “tags” on the ends of the letters and serif does. I like writing all caps sans and all lowercase serif. 🙂

And now, here are a bunch more simple fonts I wrote out to look through and use as inspiration or copy yourself. Which is your favorite?

Accents

Now that you got some fonts under your… um, pen XD, it’s fun to add little accents and flourishes to fill in the space beside the lettering. Here are a few ideas to get you started, and you can find a bunch more on Pinterest and the “Doodly Accents” section of PicMonkey. 🙂

Inspiration

Still need some more ideas to get your creativity flowing? Here are a few of my recent (and not-so-recent) lettering pieces.

You can hand letter with any medium you wish! Here I used my watercolor brush pens which are super fun for lettering.

 

Quote from Jane Austen’s Emma

For this one I used a blue notebook marker + a blue ballpoint pen. I love adding vines to letters, but it does take a bit of time and patience. 😉 Another fun thing to do for fonts with thick, solid bars of color like below is to add zigzags or circles or other patterns inside the bars for more interest.

Quote from Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth

This is the first page in my second bullet journal. I like how the mix of colored pencil and ballpoint pen looks together. 🙂

Not quite the right season for this, but hey, it’s lettering! XD I think it looks really neat to overlap some letters, like I did with the ‘y’ and the ‘o’. Also a little extra line of a different color beside the downstrokes adds a shadow effect and makes it look more special.

And lastly, a lovely Bible verse that I copied completely in blue ballpoint pen. (By the way, these Pilot G2 pens are practically THE BEST PENS EVERRR. They write super smoothly and you can get them in a range of point sizes.)

That’s all I have for today, so hopefully you’re inspired by now. 😀 If you did make some hand lettering inspired by this post, we’d love to see it! Check out how to help us fill our art gallery here.

***Allison**

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Episode 38

Hey, guys! Welcome back to another episode of Art Lab. 🙂

Today I want to show you how to draw “spaghetti mountains,” which is what I decided to call this certain doodling technique. 😛 I think it looks so neat in the end, and it’s quite fun and relaxing to draw.

Art Inspiration:

{via}

Isn’t this gorgeous? I love it! I made a similar piece using this as inspiration, and also made you guys a little tutorial if you’d like to try it yourself. 🙂

Materials Needed:

• Paper, an ATC, canvas, etc.
• Black pens or markers (I used varying sizes of Micron pens + a black brush pen)
• A white gel pen (optional)
• Some time

1. Draw some jagged lines for mountain ridges with your thickest pen (I made the lines thicker later). Make some ridges in the background and foreground.

2. Take your second thickest pen and start filling the first mountain with “spaghetti.” XD Draw some curvy lines that all start and end at the same point, and follow each other closely. Like so.

3. Add more spaghetti in a different direction, and connecting to the noodles you already drew.

4. Keep adding more spaghetti in all different directions until you fill the whole mountain ridge.

5. Now for the ridge behind it. Use a slightly thinner pen to show perspective, because things (like spaghetti) look smaller when farther away.

6. Keep it up! After you finish that ridge, move onto the one behind, using a thinner pen each time and making the lines close together. Doesn’t it look so neat thus far?

7. Add a sun behind the last ridge. I left a white space, but you wouldn’t have to. 😉

8. Next we’re going to make the “rays” of the sun. Using your thickest pen, fill in the space above the sun with rows of dots or ovals.

9. Make the dots in each new row bigger than the last…

10. Ta-daa! You’ve filled the whole page!

11. You can definitely leave it like that, but I added a bit more embellishment with a white gel pen. First I colored in the sun black, (weird, I’ve never seen a black sun before, have you? XD), and then rimmed it with dainty white dots.

12. And lastly, I added some white circles to the black dots, just to break things up a bit.

13. Ta-daa! You’re finished!

What do you think? I think… strange but neat. 🙂 I hope you get a chance to try this, because it’s quite fun and I love the end result.

If you DO make art inspired by this post, we’d love to see it! Check out this page to see how you can help us fill our gallery.

Thanks for reading, dears, and have fun making art! 🙂

***Allison***

Episode 16

Methinks it’s past time for another Art Lab episode, don’t you agree? Quite, quite.

Well, today I have a fun “two-player” art prompt for you to do with a friend or a pen-pal (or of course you could draw the whole thing by yourself).

Art Prompt: Here’s a mandala I really like.

{from this Etsy shop}

And here is a bunch of inspiration for mandala-type doodles:

{via}

Technique: Two-Player Mandala

My pen-pal Grace and I made this mandala together. We took turns adding a section each time we sent our letters until it turned out like this! Isn’t it pretty?

Mandalas don’t have many rules. The basic idea is to create a symmetrical,  circular design by adding consecutive rings of doodles. It’s fun to play with the position of the mandala – you can have it in the center of the page, running off the page, or in the corner, which is what Grace and I did. This is how the mandala looked from start to finish:

Wow. I realized this post is really short. Heh heh, oh well! I hope you enjoyed it, short though it may be! If you made some art inspired by this post, we’d love to see it! Visit this page to see how to help fill our art gallery.

Do you like doodling mandalas? Do you have a pen-pal?

***Allison***

Episode 8

Hello, hello! 😀 Today I have a fun idea-generator drawing technique to show you. If you don’t know what to draw, this might help!

Technique: Scribble Art-Starters

Begin by closing your eyes and drawing a random squiggly pattern on your paper or ATC. Open your eyes and connect both ends of the line if they’re not already connected. You should have a very strange looking blob on your paper. Here’s my scribble: