How To Practice Hand Lettering

So you want to learn hand lettering but don’t know where to start? The key to starting anything is practice, and knowing how to practice hand lettering will help you build your skills and create beautiful art. The underlying key is to build muscle memory, which only comes from focused and sustained practice.

I’ll be honest, when I first started practicing calligraphy, I tried to do everything in one go. I would just write for fun, copying things I saw on Instagram and call it a day.

But the problem was that when it came to make my own stuff, I was falling a little flat.

Here are some things to focus on when you practice hand lettering.

What do I need to practice hand lettering?

Paper and a writing utensil. Seriously, that’s it!

Since practice is all about building muscle memory, cheap paper is perfectly fine. Want to pump it up? Dot-grid or grid-lined paper will set you up for success for giving you neat guidelines.

Additionally, tracing paper lets you copy from the masters (or from printed type!). I once bought a book that had 4 sheets of tracing paper over a single lettering practice page. The tracing paper is excellent for getting the hand motions correct and when you can look at the spacing underneath.

For your writing utensil, you might want to think about this practice with each new type of pen you use. Everything from a plain pencil to a dedicated calligraphy brush marker is great to use!

Otherwise, when you’re just starting out, how about regular Crayola markers? Check out these resources for marker calligraphy!

I’ve got my supplies! What’s next?

If you didn’t opt for dot-grid or grid lined paper, the next step is to draw your guidelines.

Drawing lines across your paper might be a chore, but when you’re first starting to practice hand lettering, proportions are key to building good letters.

Draw your lines in sets of 4. These lines represent (from top to bottom):

The ascender line: This is the tallest your letters should ever be. This is important for capital letters and lowercase b, d, f, h, k, and l.
The x-height: This is the main height for most of your lowercase letters. Keeping this consistent helps make your lettering look clean.
The baseline: Your letters start from this line. Keeping a consistent baseline as well helps your lettering look clean.
The descender line: This is the lowest your letters should ever go. It’s important for lowercase letters like f, g, j, p, q, y, and z.

As you get better, these guidelines can be broken. But starting off with these lines helps build your skills.

A little understanding of things like baselines and x-heights can help your calligraphy look cleaner than if you just put letters on the page willy-nilly! Trust me, I learned this the long way. I definitely saw my calligraphy get stagnant when I was just copying and not really understanding.

What should I be practicing?

Basic Strokes.

You’re not going to write every single word in the world over and over to prove that you can. Hand lettering is much simpler than that! You’ll want to break down words into strokes, the individual parts of letters that are built up.

Let’s start with block letters. Simple, right? Block letters are made up of straight, precise strokes (except when they’re meant to be curved!). The lines are:

Vertical lines (up and down)
Diagonal lines (to the left and to the right, up and down!)
Horizontal lines
Half curves
Circles

(Becca from The Happy Ever Crafter has an awesome video on these!)

Similarly, you might want to practice more fluid writing than block letters. The 8 calligraphy basic strokes build up the foundation for those fancy looking letters. They are:

The Upstroke
The Downstroke
The Overturn
The Under turn
The Compound Curve
The Circle
The Ascender
The Descender

And…. go! Go slow at first, and write these over and over again to make sure you’ve got them down pat!

When you practice hand lettering, be mindful.

The key to practicing hand lettering isn’t just going through the motions; it’s being mindful of the changes.

When you write your letters, pay attention to some of the small things. For example,

Are your lines straight?
Are the curves symmetrical?
Do your downstrokes and upstrokes a consistent width?
Are your starting your strokes hitting your guidelines?
Are you closing your circles at the same point?

And on and on. The above questions were the ones I was looking at in particular.

Use a different color pen or marker to go back and look at what you’ve written already.

For myself, I noticed two things in my practice, which I wrote in those last two questions above. One was that I don’t hit my guidelines consistently. If I lose focus, I end up going slightly below my target points. The other was that particularly for my circles, I have a little “notch” where my endpoint and my start point reconnect! I really need to focus when I’m trying to connect them up!

How long should I be practicing for?

Set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 minutes and just practice for that long.

Maybe you do 2 lines of a single basic stroke, critique it, and then do another two lines, correcting the issues of the first set. Then switch to another basic stroke and repeat until time is up.

Build that muscle memory! Be consistent and you’ll get to where you want to go!

Happy practicing!