A short and easy guide to Hand lettering part 4

For all those that don't check YouTube for resources, and use Bullet Journal Amino as their first address to check out new stuff and learn, I decided to make a guide on Handlettering. I will share what I know about it, how I started out and how you can improve and all the handy dandy tips I can give you (this is becoming my fave word, watch out)

I am no pro, but I can make it look good and that's the most important part. So you can totally trust me :grin:

Today we are going to talk about Coloring. Now, this is the most fun part, because there are no rules. You can do whatever you want. I encourage you to try stuff out, because there are eternal possibilities to do this. It may fail at times, but who cares. You can only find new options, if you search for them.

I will show you the basic "someone-should-have-told-me-this-in-the-beginning" way. And later on, we talk about variations. Also it's gonna be picture heavy. I tried to take the pictures as best as possible. If you have any questions, write me :blush:

There are 4 steps to coloring:

1. Lettering

2. Grading

3. Shading

4. Highlighting

You should do them in this order. It makes sense. Let's take a closer look into each step.

1. Letter the word in Color

Ha, yeah, I know, who would have guessed. And just to annoy everyone: Use the pencil first

I'm going to use my Tombows today, but any colored Brush pens are totally fine. And if you don't own any supplies yet, but want to start out, either make a short trip to Ikea and get the Mala felt tip pens or by the crayola supertips (I used them for the header picture)

Erase the pencil first if you are not using strong colors, because it will look through otherwise!

2. Grading

There are two ways to grade. Either you use the same color or you add a new one.

Just choose where you want to add the color, normally the grading goes top to bottom, or the other way around.

I chose to add it at the bottom of the letters.

After that you take the former color and go over the 2nd color to blend the colors together.

If you have low quality paper, your journal may not like this step and the paper may start to feather. This is only bad if the color bleeds through otherwise the paper will dry and everything will be okay (you can do this on high quality paper, cut it out and glue it in your Journal).

On the second picture I used the same color again and started at the top.

Also the grading will fully be seen, when the colors dry, so wait a minute before you continue.

3. Shading

To make the lettering more visible and dimensional, we like to add shading. I'm really bad with shading, I always make mistakes. Imagine the writing in 3D or imagine the same letter in the background. Or just do what I'm doing.

You can take whatever color you like, but as a standard I take gray. As a general rule the color shouldn't be stronger then the color you used for the lettering. Rules are there to be broken btw.

You can also use a border to enhance your lettering (looks cute and all)

To make the shading even more visible I also added some more border

4. Highlighting

As far as I know, this basically only works with white gel pens (or anything that is brighter and covers the color underneath) Now I recommend for highlighting, that less is more. But, whatever works best for you, you know.

And I that's it, perfect handlettering! You can stop at whatever step you like. Now for funsies, let's take a look at variations. As mentioned before you can do whatever you want. You can also use crayons or colored fineliners

This was graded with crayons. You use the same technique as explained above. Also you csn see a colored fineliner I used for the border. I did the same in the next picture.

I made some more variations here (although this became a little messy, I still decided to include it)

You can grade with more than one color, take a complete different color, or not blend the colors with each other

I put the border on the first A on the other side, and use a black shading on the 2nd and left a white space on the S

Why not highlight with some patterns

What a cute little effect

Yeah, that kinda failed, but it could still work if you make a coffee spread for example.

I think you got the idea and don't worry about mistakes, look how I make them all the time. I would probably draw black stars over the smear or use the white gel pen to remove it.

That's it. I thought about making two posts about this. But then I decided against it. I'd rather have the post longer but everything in one place where it belongs.

This post build up on the former tutorials which can be found here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I also want to give you this YouTube link. This was the best explanation, I ever got. So watch this, too.

P.S.

That's btw what happen when I make these awesome posts for you

I go cleaning now :joy: