5 untold lessons on how to get better results in Calligraphy

Calligraphy isn’t easy but the process shouldn’t be painful. So here’s my top 5 untold lessons on how to get better results in Calligraphy!

A myriad of fun calligraphy styles I drew on Procreate and analogue (paper) and compiled in Adobe Photoshop

1. Master your basics first.

   If your letters don’t look good in pencil, they probably won’t too with a brush pen or pointed pen.
   
   Similarly, if your base script foundation doesn’t look good, piling on flourishes won’t mask the mistakes either.

2. Be legible first, fancy later.

   Imagine: your letters are the base foundation of a cake and flourishes are icing on the cake. If a cake looks good but tastes bad, would you eat it?
   
   So - if the script looks fancy, but it’s hard for someone to read it, would you say it has served its purpose*? Remember, good design serves both visual appeal and practical functional use.
   
   (*Notable exception: abstract art)

3. Know what you’re studying and what you’re practising.

   Traditional script follows consistent rules and guides. Modern calligraphy breaks them.

   
   First off, there are many different types of traditional script. It’s important to focus on one style before moving on to the next as individual scripts would display different traits and features such as slant angles, letter ratios, letter connection, stroke contrast etc. If you’re learning both Copperplate and Spencerian at the same time, it may be confusing! Plus, it’s easier to gain muscle memory focusing on a single script first than multiple scripts.

   
   Pablo Picasso once said — 'Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.' That’s where the fun starts.

4. Observation first, practise later.

   Most would preach “quality is more important than quantity”, but there are also merits in quantity leading to quality over time.
   
   But hey - why not both? Quality AND quantity ie. train your eyes first before training your hand. Now that our eyes are trained to spot the differences between good and bad work, next - let’s put in the practice hours to train our hands, and bring our work from good to great.
   
   Don’t be wasting time practising a stroke 1,000 times incorrectly, this just reinforces bad habits which have to be unlearned later on. 

5. Challenge your mind: question everything, assume nothing.

   When it comes to learning, reignite your child-like curiosity. Challenge your mind: question everything, assume nothing - that’s where we can gain clarity and fully comprehend why things are the way they are.
   
   If not, we’d just think we know when we actually don’t. And even if you can’t find an answer right away, you’ll probably learn way more in your search for an answer than assuming the status quo is right.

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I hope you’d find these lessons helpful! I wish someone told me all these when I first started. If you’re feeling ready to level up your calligraphy, feel free to check out my online course (with a free class available to watch). I’ll share and teach you all I know.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’ve any questions - comment below, I’m here to help!

Cheers,
Leah

How-To Tutorial: Hand Lettering on an Unconventional Canvas / Drawing on Denim Jackets!

If you’re up to experiment on other surfaces other than paper, read on! There are a ton of other items and surfaces that can be your canvas – think: mugs, tote bags, shirts and even walls. In this case, I’ve chose to draw on my denim outerwear.

Materials You’ll Need:

1. Any pencils you’ve on hand 

2. Tracing paper

3. Carbon/ graphite/ transfer paper - I use Saral graphite paper for large scale projects, and carbon paper for small scale projects.

4. Your favourite brand of acrylic/ fabric maker – for me, I chose Molotow’s Acrylic Markers as my weapon of choice

5. Masking tape (optional)

6. An unconventional canvas 

7. Your favourite Spotify playlist

Here’s How:

1. Create a design around your favourite quote/ phrase – bonus points if it’s relevant to your canvas for that *conceptual flair*

In this case, I came up with “dressed and depressed” (inspired by my monstrous mood swings during the time of the month) It’s related to apparel and I’m loving the rhyme going on. You’ll notice I switched out “and” with “n” so that the two will flow and line up better when stacked.

2. If you’ve done step 1 on a piece of paper, place your tracing paper above your sketch and trace it.

3. Place the carbon paper above the surface area of your canvas, followed by your tracing paper above the carbon paper. Make sure to lay the carbon paper with carbon side down. Tape them down to secure.

4. Trace around your design with any pencil. This process transfers any markings made by the pressure applied by the pencil. Remember to check back to see if the design has transferred evenly. If not, my dear, you’re too gentle!

5. You should have your final design transferred on your canvas. Now, turn up the music, it’s time to ink! Depending on the size of your canvas, you can opt for a more fine-tip marker (e.g. 1.5mm Molotow Marker) to outline and a 4mm Molotow Marker for the fills.

6. Wait for the ink to be permanently dry, 24 hours’ best. To ensure washability, remember to heat set it using an iron with a piece of parchment/ printing paper in between the iron and your artwork.

Congrats, you did it! Now go rock that style.

Much Love,
Leah

PS: I did the same process with a canvas tote bag, watch the time-lapse here:

Drawing letters A-Z in various typographic styles + embellishments as a sample piece for my tote bag handlettering workshop class this weekend.

How to DIY a Wall Tapestry/ Banner | Tips and Tricks

I recently did a Wall Tapestry/ Banner for a marriage proposal and I thought I'll share with you my process, along with some tips and tricks. 

For this project, I made a "Will You Marry Me" Wall Tapestry and 2 other smaller scale banners with wooden dowels for the proposal set-up. 

Let's get started.

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First thing first - cloth.

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

Ideally, try to go for fabric that has a higher thread count, which is most likely to be less porous. A fabric like 100% cotton is easy for the paint to glide on due to how tightly threaded it is. Essentially, any type of fabric is good to go, but when the fabric is loosely threaded or woven, be prepared to use more paint than you should because you will need to do several coatings of paint for the design to show true and vibrant. (Imagine this analogy of a sponge vs glass - sponge is porous, while glass is non-porous. So if you were to paint on these surfaces, the paint is bound to be on the surface of the glass, but more likely to seep through the sponge.) 

To tell whether or not a fabric is good to paint on, simply look at the intricate threads making up the fabric. If you can see the individual threads used, means it's more porous! 

Another thing - some fabric do shrink after washing. So you might wanna wash your fabric first to get the right sizing! Washing will also help to remove any stiffener in the fabric, which hinders paint or ink to adhere to the fibres.  

Photo by russn_fckr on Unsplash

Next - paint, or in my case, sharpies.

I love me some good ol' Sharpies! So those were what I went for in this project, especially when I wanted the crisp and thin hairlines in the upstrokes of my letterforms. Because sharpies are alcohol-based markers, they tend to bleed through the fabric, so make sure you go for a heavier weight fabric if it's within your budget. 

If not, I highly recommend these Molotow markers - they are acrylic based, not fabric markers in particular, but it works amazingly well on fabric (even the sheer and thinner ones), plus incredibly versatile for other materials like wood, leather, glass, acrylic etc. (I’ve even used Molotow markers on wall murals!).

If paint and brushes are right up your alley, definitely go for that! Plus, if you need a variety of colours in various shades, this is probably a wiser option. When I went to an art shop last year, I talked a bunch with the storekeepers there about the best paints to use for fabrics and what not, so let me share with you what I had learnt from them and other things I've read about over the year.

Fabric or textile paint/ markers fair best because they adhere to fabric better than acrylic paints for instance, which are more likely to "sit" on the fabric instead of "in" the fibres, hence easier to fade or peel off. Then again, depending on your project, acrylic paints (Golden's the best in the market!) can be good enough. They will crack in time so make sure you add a fabric agent/ medium to thin the paint so that it is easier for application and this step also helps in rendering the paint "softer" on the fabric; in other words, less likely to get all crackly. One thing to note though, the thinner the paint, the longer it takes to dry. So definitely try to find a balance there, especially if you're tight on deadlines with your project. If you're painting with intention to wear it or say, it’s likely for your work to get wet, heat-setting your work may be something you want to think about, so that it can be machine-wash ready for future repeated uses and also, more weather-proof.

Lastly - brushes.

If you're doing very detailed work, go for brushes that can hold a fine point well. If you need a good line integrity or consistency, I find that broad-edge brushes fair better as you can use the flat side of the brush and hold a consistent line weight that way. Round brushes kinda vary in line weight depending on the amount of pressure you apply. So be mindful of the brushes you use for different aspects! 

Say you're using paint that has high viscosity (thick and less fluid), perhaps opt for synthetic brushes as they have stiffer bristles/ brush hairs that can hold up heavy body paints better. Natural brushes (made from animal hairs) tend to do better for more fluid paints such as watercolours. Or, if you’re like me, who wants versatility, I use these mix media brushes from Princeton, that would work with most mediums regardless of what project I’m working on.

Some tips on - the painting/ inking process

Now that the materials are outta the way, let's talk about the fun part - inking/ painting! Ideally, you should do a mock up of your design on the fabric, especially if you've many blocks of information to put down. For me, it was pretty straightforward in terms of design, with the two key phrases - the lucky girl, "Serena Vu" and "Will You Marry Me?". I didn't have a projector on hand, so free-handing the pencil sketch was an absolute pain in the ass but I'd rather do that than ruin the fabric and repurchase another! 

Some tips for this step:

1. Iron your entire fabric first, to rid the various haywire creases, but leave the main pre-folds lightly visible. Otherwise, you can make light folds on the fabric by folding it into half and then quarters and further sub-quarters to create a grid system to guide your lettering. I self-discovered this helpful trick while figuring out how to draft up my design effectively for the project and am so glad my head was in a thinking state that day. Now, I don't have to draw in any pencil baselines to guide me, I can just use the folds! How cool is that. 

2. If you're painting/ inking on the floor or wall, add some newspaper or cardboard behind your project. I nearly inked my white wall black, I can tell ya that much. 

3. If you want to draft out some pencil line work for your letterforms, but made a couple of mistakes, don't use a normal eraser to erase them -  use a kneadable eraser. Not only can it get into various tiny nooks and crannies, it also doesn't leave any rubber dust which would otherwise catch on the fabric fibres (tho you can salvage this by running a razor over, but let's save ourselves some effort here, shall we!)

4. You can either lay your fabric on the floor or upright like I did on the wall. I'd recommend on the wall because for large-scale work, it is a ton easier to do large arm movements for a smooth curve across a large area of the fabric. If your fabric is on the floor, you're limited to the space between your body and one arm length when you're in a seated position. When you're standing up, you can manoeuvre however you'd like across the entire fabric just by keeping your upper body straight while bending your knees for upward and downward movements and sidesteps for left and right movements. Small detail point here but big differences in output. Try it out!

5. For measurements, you can use a measuring tape or ruler. However, for me, I just use my palm size as a rouge gauge to mark out the spacings between my letterforms and whether or not they're consistent relative to the other letters.

6. This last tip is kind of random, but to put my fabric up on my wall, I used 3M's Removable Mounting Strips/Tape. They can hold heavyweight items well and peels off nicely from the wall without leaving any marks or scratches on both your work and the wall.

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That's about it for this how-to / tutorial. Artists gotta help other artists, so I hope you enjoyed this read and if you do ever try this out yourself as a personal project, share 'em with me! I'll be happy to answer any further questions you may have as well. Most importantly, have fun and enjoy the process.

A time-lapse of the wall tapestry/ banner that I did will be up on my Instagram (@leahdesign), come find me!

P.s. She said yes!

Much love,
Leah

P.S. Click here to watch a free class preview from my online calligraphy course!