Brush Lettering E-Book

Rebecca Cahill Roots

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 120

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A beautifully illustrated practical guide to creating beautiful modern lettering with brushes and brush pens. Learn brush lettering with this creative guide from calligrapher extraordinaire Rebecca Cahill Roots, aka Betty Etiquette. In this quirky and relatable guide, she guides you through how to use brushes and brush pens to make exquisite letterforms. One of the most popular hand-lettering techniques, brush lettering is a beautiful, free-spirited style that, once mastered, is easy to develop into a unique personal style. The book is divided into chapters by type of media, covering ink, watercolour, gouache and brush pens. Each section contains a set of exercises for practising the technique including an alphabet and a set of numbers to copy. To finish off, there's a selection of pretty and practical projects to make using brush lettering, including beautifully decorated celebration cards, cushions and tableware.

Leseprobe

your brush lettering shopping list

If you want to get cracking right away or you’re buying this book as a gift, here are some of the basic tools you’ll need for your modern brush-lettering practice.

• A black Tombow ABT Dual brush pen

• Pro Arte Masterstroke round paintbrush size 4

• A pad of layout paper or Rhodia dot pad

• HP Premium LaserJet printer paper

• A ruler

• A pot of Higgins Eternal black ink

• A good eraser (my favourite is the Faber-Castell Dust-Free)

• Washi tape or a clipboard to help you keep your paper and guidelines in place.

For Little R, my incredible inventor x

Contents

WELL HELLO THERE!

WHAT IS BRUSH LETTERING?

GETTING STARTED

THE BASIC STROKES

LUSCIOUS LETTERS

THE MIGHTY PEN

MY BRUSH PEN SHOPPING LIST

FLOURISHING

COMPOSITION

MY PEN PALS

TRYING NEW TECHNIQUES

PROJECT IDEAS

TROUBLESHOOTING

TEMPLATES

SUPPLIERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

Well hello there!

Thank you so much for choosing this book to help you to get to grips with brush lettering. Whether you’ve got a project in mind that you’re working towards, or you just fancy starting a new hobby, I’m thrilled to be part of your creative journey.

I’m Rebecca, I’m a calligrapher and I run Betty Etiquette, a hand-lettering and design studio where I create lettering for logos, magazines and weddings along with my own stationery range. Since writing my first book, Modern Lettering, in 2016, hand lettering has become an incredibly popular hobby for people around the world, and it is now commonly used in advertising, stationery, clothing and interior design.

As I write this introduction I’m sitting in a café near my home in London, England. Around me I can see different styles of hand lettering used on the chalkboards, menus and coffee cups, all providing information with a friendly, handwritten vibe. I can also see everyone around me on their phones and laptops, hidden away in digital worlds, only looking up for the occasional coffee sip or daydream. But as we slowly increase the amount of time we are spending buried away in screens, I believe we’re also lusting after tactile, handmade aesthetics that reconnect us with family, history and our culture.

People are shopping handmade more, seeking out personalized presents and taking time out of their busy lives to learn traditional skills, such as weaving, woodturning and hand lettering. As an advocate for putting pen to paper and all things handmade, I’m delighted that hand lettering is fashionable again. I hope this book steals you away from the screens in your life for a while to give you the chance to slow down and learn something new.

I’ve been fascinated with lettering from a young age, and from the moment my big sister let me try out her calligraphy set and her dreamy collection of rainbow-coloured inks, it’s been a real obsession of mine. Over the last 10 years I have begun experimenting with bolder techniques including brush lettering. I touched on this lettering style in Modern Lettering, and thanks to your messages and requests since the book was published, I’m thrilled to now bring you a big beasty book of brush-lettering ideas.

This book will walk you through the techniques I’ve learnt on my brush-lettering journey so far, both through my own lettering practice and from seeing participants at my workshops get to grips with the process. I’ve also enlisted some pen pals – some fantastic lettering artists from around the world – to show you their work so that you can see just how versatile the lettering style is and how you, too, can add your own personality to your pieces.

So whatever has inspired you to pick up a brush pen or paintbrush, I hope this book fills you with ideas and that like me, you too discover an overriding passion to write on anything that will sit still long enough to let you!

Now I’ve introduced myself, let’s get down to the good stuff…

CHAPTER 1

What is brush lettering?

When I tell people what I do, they often ask what brush lettering is and if it is a type of calligraphy. So I thought I’d start by telling you a little more about this beautiful art form and why I fell in love with it.

The word calligraphy broadly means decorative handwriting or handwritten lettering. It describes the process of writing not just to get a message across or to provide information, but to display words in an imaginative, artistic form. It’s something more magical than simple handwriting for function. It’s the difference between a quick note on a park bench saying ‘WET PAINT’ and a carefully drawn message to announce the potential wet paint disaster with artistic shape and form.

Traditional Western calligraphy is created using a dip pen and nib and may conjure up images in your mind of the lettering at the bottom of a certificate or the quotes on the wall in a church or school. To create this type of lettering you use flat-edged, broad-edged or chisel-tipped nibs and follow specific rules about the angle at which you hold your pen and the size of the letters you make in relation to each other. But over the last 15 years a new style of lettering has emerged called modern calligraphy, which is created with a pointed nib and ink. It’s a free and joyful style of lettering with very few rules, and it can be used for everything from wedding stationery to logo design.

So how does brush lettering fit in with this lettering trend? Modern brush lettering, or brush calligraphy as it is often called, is similar to the style of popular modern calligraphy, but it is created using different tools. Modern brush lettering uses brush pens and brushes and ink to create beautiful letterforms that are playful and bold. In the same way that dip pen calligraphy has developed its own contemporary style, brush lettering has had a recent resurgence in interest and taken on a new and exciting role in today’s media.

The use of brushes for lettering is not a new thing, however; it can be traced as far back as around 300BC to China, where an ink brush was found in the tomb of a Chu citizen. Whereas Western calligraphy focused primarily on nib and ink as handwriting developed, brush lettering has played an extremely important part in the history of Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan and other far eastern cultures.

Traditionally, brushes were made with animal hair, ranging from goat, pig or rabbit to the more exotic tiger hair, tied to a handle made from bamboo, or for the wealthy, gold, jade or ivory. To be able to write beautifully was held in extremely high regard: in China it was seen as one of the four great things a successful intellect should be able to do.

As with dip pen calligraphy, traditional brush calligraphy had its own strict set of rules to learn. A Chinese calligrapher would practise for many years to master the correct symbol form, stroke pattern, pressure and ink/water ratio to be regarded as a true lettering artist. But of equal importance was the spirit of the calligrapher, or Yi as it was called. Yi means ‘intention or idea’, and this was seen as vital for the calligrapher to bring the letters to life. I love this concept and recognize it in my work and that of my workshop students: if your head and heart are fully engaged in your lettering, something magical happens that brings those simple pen or brush marks to life.

Although nib and ink led the way in establishing literacy in Western culture, we should not forget that brushes have been used for lettering in signwriting, religious documents and graphic design for hundreds of years. Modern brush lettering brings together the traditional methods and equipment of brush calligraphy with the decorative lettering styles of modern calligraphy made with a dip pen, and lettering artists are using brushes, inks, paints and the fantastic new brush pens that have appeared on the market over the last 15 years to create this vibrant new style. Modern brush lettering asks you to commit to the patience, calm and focus that traditional brush calligraphy requires, but like modern calligraphy, it allows you to play around with the letterforms to express your personality.

In this book we are going to learn how to use both brushes and brush pens to create dynamic lettering styles. We will be focusing on brush-script styles that connect in a cursive flow and I’ll be introducing you to a few hand-lettering fonts that are created using single, unconnected letters. I want to help you find a way to master the pen or brush you choose, so that you can fall in love with this art form as I have, and to enable you to make beautiful projects to share your skills with others.

WHY USE HAND LETTERING IN A DIGITAL WORLD?

If you’ve attended one of my workshops in the past you will have heard me bang on about this before, but I can’t advocate enough for putting pen to paper in a world that is slowly becoming more and more digitally focused. It’s so easy to get lost in social media and advertising images that are airbrushed, manipulated and tweaked to be picture-perfect. But why, you may ask, when our lives are busy enough and with thousands of brush-lettering digital fonts at our fingertips, should we bother to take the time to do it ourselves?

REASON 1: IT’S UNIQUE

You’re creating a limited edition work of art each time you write something. Even if you copy your work out extremely carefully again, it will be slightly different. Perhaps a curve of a letter is a little flatter, the length of a flourish is accidentally longer; however hard you try, there will be tiny differences. It makes each letter you write or every project you make a one-off: made by your hand, it can’t be copied, and that’s the reason I fell in love with hand lettering.

REASON 2: IT’S SPECIAL

We have more communication tools than ever before, but there’s still nothing quite like the feeling we get when we receive a handwritten card or gift. To know how much time someone has put into making it especially for us, and thinking of us as they do so, will always beat a WhatsApp message or digital Christmas card.

REASON 3: IT’S MINDFUL

Brush-lettering practice can have a positive effect on your mental health. As with many art forms, the process of practising brush lettering forces you to focus your attention on the shapes you are making, enabling you to slow your thoughts down. Participants at my workshops often talk about how they feel relaxed afterwards because they have put away their phones and allowed themselves to completely focus.

REASON 4: IT’S GOOD FOR THE MEMORY

Research carried out by scientists at Princeton University and the University of California found that writing by hand is far more useful for retaining conceptual ideas and for the long-term memory of information. So using handwriting for your notes or journal actually helps you to better remember information than typing it into your phone or laptop.

REASON 5: IT’S FOR SHARING

You are creating something that will not only make you happy as you do so, but that you can so easily share with friends and family. Unlike some hobbies, you can sneak brush lettering into your daily life at every opportunity. Whether it’s creating a birthday card, writing out a tea or coffee preference list at work, or adding notes in a photo album, people will really appreciate the time and skill required to make beautiful lettering.

It’s that final reason that is my personal number one for encouraging people to have a go at brush lettering, for the pleasure it brings to others. I love sending letters and parcels with brush lettering all over the packaging, as I know it will bring joy to the recipients. Even the fairly grumpy postman in my local post office always mentions the lettering when he’s weighing the packages and carefully puts the labels to the side to avoid covering it. When asked by a client to write out a couple’s wedding vows for their wall, or a special quote for a friend who is grieving, I always find it to be a complete privilege. A pen or brush really is a mighty tool and I can’t wait to see how you are going to use yours.

CHAPTER 2

Getting started

So let me just get this out of my system before I start this chapter… I hate the bit in craft books that tells you how to use them. It’s your book and you can use it in whatever way you like, thank you please. If you’re like me, you’ll already be covered in ink, pen in hand and on the first exercises, dipping back into the instructions as you go. But I know others prefer to follow a book page by page and build up to the exercises more slowly. So whether you’re the type that races ahead and then goes back for the details, or you’re a page-by-page learner, feel free to use this book in the way that works best for you. Here’s what we’re going to work through together so you can decide how you want to organize your learning.

First, in this chapter we are going to get to grips with the materials you are going to need for brush lettering. You might have a few bits lurking at home, or want to gather some more before we get started, but we’ll begin with just the essentials and build up from there. Once we’ve set up our workspace and covered a few basics, such as how to hold your pen, we can get cracking in Chapter 2 on the basic strokes needed for all the styles shown in this book. Then in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, it’s time to get practising to try out a range of different alphabet styles, and perhaps a selection of different pens or brushes.

A big part of conquering lettering practice is composition, so in Chapters 7 and 8 we will look at how to lay out your work. In Chapter 9