Hi guys in today's video I have some classic Shayda Campbell content for you
we're going to be doing another hand lettering tutorial so let's get started
Hey guys I'm Shayda and on this channel I do hand lettering tutorials bullet
journal watercolor all that good stuff so if you're new here consider
subscribing if you haven't already okay so in today's tutorial we are going to
be doing a hand lettering style that is a serif font it starts as a serif font
and then once we kind of get the hang of this new lettering style I am going to
show you how you can change it around and make it into a sans serif if you're
confused about that I have a lettering video all about typeface classification
and I'll link it in the description below but basically a serif font is a
font with those lines that run perpendicular to the letter so if you
picture an I that's just a rectangle that's probably a sans serif
so without serif and a serif font would be an I that maybe has perpendicular
lines at the top at the bottom so basically that's my very basic intro to
serif sans serif watch the other video and join me now because we're going to
sort of tackle some different cool lettering styles that I think you'll
really enjoy mixing with your cursive lettering styles so let's just get to it
and actually one more thing I have a worksheet to go along with this
lettering video and I'm really excited because now you can get all of the extra
channel content on my patreon and you don't have to pay for each worksheet
each printer printable it's all available for only $2 a month so go over
there get your worksheet but watch the video first
so in today's hand-lettering tutorial I'm sharing this lettering style with
you that I think is so versatile and it really can turn out to be whatever you
want it to be in in many ways so I'm just gonna jump right in and I think by
the end of the tutorial you'll see what I mean now my first piece of advice is
to start off on graph paper lettering on graph paper especially for your practice
just makes it so much easier you don't have to get out the ruler nearly as
often and as you can see here I'm doing a serif font a serif is a font that has
those little line so those little lines that I'm doing right now sort of coming
off the ends of the letter sans serif is a font that doesn't have those lines
and for my particular style here I am making sure that all these strokes or
parts of the letter that go vertically they're thicker and then the strokes
that go horizontally they're much thinner so that's sort of the guidelines
for doing these letters now because I'm working on graph paper it makes it
really easy for me to lay down my guidelines so let's talk a little bit
about that before we go any further so across the top here I'm gonna lay down a
line and that is my height line across the bottom that is what is called the
base line and then where the middle of the letter is like where the cross on a
tee would be that's called the waist line now I think these guidelines are
really helpful no matter what style of lettering you're doing but especially
for something that's not so fluid for doing these serif letters the guidelines
are very helpful so let's do a D here so that you can see how it works the D
starts at the baseline stops at the height line and of course the smaller
part of the D starts at the base line and stops at the waist line in the
middle and you'll see for a letter like C that isn't quite so tall it also
starts at the base line stops at the waist line so by putting those
guidelines in you really set yourself up for success now when you're doing a
very structured serif font like this not only do you want your baseline height
line and waist line but you also want to give yourself some guidelines for how
big the letter is going to be so you can see I'm writing in my letter E here and
I'm allowing the thicker part of that letter to be about the size of one whole
block of squares these are sort of one centimeter squares so I can say each
time the thick part of the letter it's about a centimeter and that helps me to
make letters that look really uniform and it just helps you to be so much more
successful I can't recommend graph paper enough you can also say okay I'm going
to put one like you know one line in between each letter so it also helps
with spacing and of course you can give yourself some vertical lines and say you
know in between these lines that's where my letter is going to be so here we go
I've got it in blue base line height line waist line and then the guidelines
that help me to know where my letter should start and stop I'm gonna do the
letter G so I'm going right over to the right hand side the side of the G is
going to be about a centimeter there so about one block and there you can see
I've got a really nice uniform letter that fits in with the rest of them
because this is a serif font I simply add those little sort of I don't know
what to call them lines little wingdings on the end of each letter you can see
for the H at the base and the top I put these simple straight lines and again
the graph paper helps so much to allow me to know how big should those lines
really be and I can use the graph paper as my guide let me go over this in pen
so you can really see so there's my lines that make it into a serif font and
you can see here how the graph paper helps me to know how wide should these
vertical strokes really be because the the horizontal strokes are easy there's
thin but you want those vertical strokes the up and down bits of the letter you
want them to be quite uniform you know you don't want the H to be half a
centimeter thick and then the I to be a full centimeter because you made a
mistake so uniformity is going to be your best friend when you're looking for
success in hand lettering
next let's go over some more of
these letters and pen so you can really see what I'm talking about so with the D
here I've got my vertical area of the letter that's about a centimeter thick
and I'm doing that according to the graph paper and I'm gonna fill this in
with just some simple line shading and this is something I go back to again and
again gives it it's a nice way to fill in any thick letters and I'm just gonna
write here that it goes starts at the base line goes up to the height line the
middle part of the letter stops or starts at that waist line and let me see
I'm gonna go over this in blue I think you guys probably get this but you can
see here each thickened part each vertical part of the letter that's
thickened it's all the same size and I can do that and I can achieve that
because of the graph paper and that graph paper is super helpful and I
didn't know this for the longest time but graph paper comes in all different
sizes so you can look for different sizes of squares and find the one that's
best for you or you could have a few different sizes and see about which one
is the right one for the type of lettering that you're doing at the time
does anyone caught my mistake yet I missed thickening the the E here on the
right hand side so it's easy to make that mistake there's obviously two areas
of that letter that are vertical and so those both need to be thickened however
that does get me thinking well there's no rules here we're making up our own
lettering styles as we go so let's try something else let's try the same sort
of serif style but only thicken one side see how different that is already we've
created a different letter that maybe is better for the project that you're
working on so let's try it with the A we'll thicken the right hand side here
but we'll leave the left hand side thin and I think both look nice but it just
depends on the project that you're working on I'll go over this and pen so
you can see it a little more here I actually really like the serif font with
the just the one side thickened so I think that looks really cool now that
we've done that why don't we say okay we don't want this to be a serif
font we don't want those little lines that's too fancy so let's try the e
again but we're gonna take off the little the little lines the little
wing-dings they're gone so sort of a simpler lettering style here we're still
gonna thicken that line we'll leave the other side thin and then there's no
extra lines coming off the ends of the letter so that would be a song serif
font and I think it looks really cool so you can see how easy it is with the
graph paper and with just a little bit of knowledge about different typefaces
you can really try different things you can think what's the right hand
lettering style for me to use on this project and I do have a video all about
typeface classification so serif sans serif cursive and I will link that in
the below the video now here I've laid down my guidelines and I've put the
waistline quite low and I'm just going to draw an X I'm just showing you guys
here what you can do by simply having your guidelines done ahead of time and
just sort of thinking about what you want to achieve before you even get
started so this would be quite a large letter with a very low waistline and it
gives a really cool look and anytime you have that thick down stroke or thick
vertical stroke you're always free to fill it in however you want and that
really opens you up to creating all kinds of versatile and interesting
lettering styles so here I'm going to fill this X in by stippling and I'm
going to start really dark so really close the dots are all very very close
together and then they get farther and farther apart as I go down and it just
gives this nice visual interest here I've used my pencil and graph paper to
do the serif font that I started the video with and I'm gonna go over it and
pen and then we're gonna add some detail that I think is really interesting and
again really versatile so I've got just the letters S and O I'm thickening both
vertical strokes they're both vertical parts of the letter now I always it
always takes me a minute in pencil to work out the shape of the letter
especially an S, so take your time with your graph
paper and pencil once you've gone over it and pen you can erase it and then
here's the trick with this hand lettering style you're going to take
your artists pen and carefully make an inline just inside that blank part of
the letter now just be very careful a steady hand is key here because you want
there to be white space between these lines because once you fill them in you
want that nice white or negative space in line so you can see what I'm doing
here and now now that I've got those outlines I'm going to fill this in and
it adds a wonderful detail to this letter so the first one I'm just gonna
fill it in black so you can really get the effect and and see what I'm driving
at here and then for the next one we're going to do some some more interesting
fill work on the O I'll start by just coloring it in really dark at the bottom
and then again I'm gonna use my stippling technique so starting with
these dots that are really really close together and then letting them get
farther and farther apart to create a look of lightening or shading within the
letter so this is quite detailed it's great if you have a set of the
Pigma Microns from Sakura or similar artists pens because you want the different nib
sizes so that you can achieve this fine fine detail and on the other side of the
O I'm just doing that line shading again same idea starting close together
for a look of darkness and finishing a little lighter at the top
so I hope you're getting a feel for how versatile this style can be you can
choose between serif and sans-serif do you want to thicken both sides of a
letter or just one and then once you've got the style you like if you've got
that thickened stroke somewhere on the letter you can fill it in in all these
different ways depending on the project so let's try something a little more fun
here you can see I'm working again with my graph paper and my pencil to write
out the word T and I'm just being careful to make sure that every letter
is the same size that every vertical stroke is the same size and that they're
equally spaced and then once I've got my initial layout all done I've put in the
work of making sure everything looks uniform then I'm going to go over it in
pen and just make sure I like the look and the shape of the letters that I've
drawn out and they don't need to be perfect this isn't about getting things
you know perfect it's not you're not a computer but it's just about making sure
they're not you know wonky or especially not spaced improperly and then once
you've gone over it and pen you like the look of your lettering we're going to
again create that in line inside the thick part of the letter so just steady
hand carefully doing that line and then what we're gonna do we're gonna extract
this from our graph paper and you can do that simply by tracing within computer
paper or maybe by putting this on a light table or you can always trace
using a window and I'm just going here with a thin computer paper so I can
actually see right through it because I did go over the graph sketch in pen and
I'm just going to carefully go over everything again sometimes I find it
helpful to do that in line with pencil just so that I have something to follow
and yeah I'm going to add something kind of fun inside of the lining on these ones
so with that negative space inside the
letter just waiting for me to add something I've decided I'll add some
little flowers and leaves I know I know I'm obsessed with flowers and leaves but
this is just one more fun thing I mean you could draw anything in there you
could put like a little mountain scene or a starry night or a jungle whatever
you can imagine and I'm just sort of doing a garden with these vines creeping
up towards the top of the letter I'm still going for that look that I used
with the stippling and the lines shading where I'm sort of allowing the letter to
breathe a little at the top and not quite filling it in all the way so
leaving a little negative space and I think that leads me to something really
successful and really pretty and you can see me just filling in every letter here
I'm using one of my smaller nibs from in the Sakura set so I've got a set of
these 8 pens of archival quality inks and the smallest nib I have is the 003
so it's really really tiny and that's what I'm using here and it's perfect for
doing these detailed leaves and flower illustrations okay and that's what it
looks like when it's pretty much all done thanks for watching today guys I
hope you enjoyed this hand lettering video it's been a while since we've done
one you can head over to patreon.com/shaydacampbell and grab
your worksheets everything over there is available for $2 a month so these are a
great way to practice your own lettering thanks again for watching and I will see
you next week with a new tutorial
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