Brush lettering practice

There is nothing more satisfying for me to do lately than practicing my brush lettering everyday. I have been posting photos of what I have done on my Instagram (Azlina Abdul) every other day from late last year till now. The photos above are photos of brush lettering practices that I have posted there and I wanted to share them with everyone here too.

For me brush lettering is not something that is easy for me to do but somehow doing it makes me feel so relaxed and at peace. I prefer to use watercolour as my medium to practice brush lettering but I also love to explore other mediums like inks of various kinds. 

I would start by choosing a sentiment that I love and practice writing it with any brush tool I like.....and will keep writing and writing till my hand is sore. I won't give up until I am truly satisfied with the outcome. Usually when I start, it doesn't always look as nice as the photos you see here. It would take a while before it looks ok for me to post them online. A lot of papers wasted in the process, believe you me. But it is necessary in order to get the hang of it. 

There are a lot of styles when it comes to brush lettering and at the moment I seem to be good with my own style. Haha! Just one. One that I am comfortable with. It's close to my own handwriting. The only difference is the letter "R". I usually write my R in a different way, but now I'm practicing it the way it's supposed to be written. There are so many styles of writing the letter R in calligraphy, especially if you write it using a different tool. For now I'm just gonna practice with brushes......perhaps in future I'll use calligraphy pens too. Those are super interesting to try! :) 

As for brushes.....I would have to say that the water brush is simply a wonderful tool for brush lettering. I just wish they make them smaller in size, then I would be able to write smaller writings on paper for my handmade cards. For now I only use those  watercolour brushes for small lettering. The effect it gives is of course different with different tools used. So I just have to know which works out well for which project I'm making.

A birthday wish

HB128

This little project was something that came to mind last year. I've always wanted to do something like this someday and I'm happy that I can do it this year. I did mentioned in my previous post that I wanted to write more sentiments on my handmade cards. And here for the first time, I used a watercolour brush to write the sentiments. It was really thrilling, exhausting and worth every sweat and ache. I had to practice writing them first before I could actually write them on the die cut labels. Practiced writing all the alphabets from A to Z. So practiced and practiced I did till my hand ached all over. 

I see a lot of people doing brush lettering on Instagram and on YouTube and they all make it look so easy. The words just flows easily with the brush like no sweat at all. I guess it looks that way when you are already an expert and have been doing it for years. For a beginner like me, well, it was not as easy. It can be a little frustrating especially since I wanted to be able to write it as fast as I could. But I realised that it really does takes a lot of time to do it. A letter at a time.

For the sentiments on this card, I just used the smallest watercolour brush that I could find at the art supply store to write the sentiments as it is for a small handmade card, so the smaller it is the better. I had a hard time deciding how to position the words on the label. At first I tried writing "Happy Birthday" but it didn't worked out as nice as I wanted it to be, so I ended up writing "A birthday wish" instead. And I was really happy with that. 

At first I had the labels rectangular in shape like the photo above but decided to cut them up using the oval die cut label pattern because I thought it suited the sentiments better. Therefore I also had to change the design of the flower arrangement a little. Not much.

Doing watercolour designs on my handmade cards is something that I have always wanted to do. For this card, I decided to start small and just do a simple flower decoration around the label. Nothing complicated, really simple and sweet. Something to get me started and motivated to do more for the other cards in future. I really enjoyed using the water brush to paint the flower arrangement. It was really fun and easy. I love using the water brush as it was not too runny, and the water flowed a little at a time, so it was easy to control the water flow.

Since the flowers and leaves that I wanted to paint on the label are pretty small, I thought it would be better to use watercolour pencils instead of the using the ones from the tube. What I did was I wet the watercolour pencils with the water brush and coloured the flowers and leaves with it. I only needed a little colour for all the flowers and leaves. So the water colour pencils worked out fine as I was able to control the amount of colour I needed to use. 

I really love this chain stitch I did for this card. This is the first time for me to do it on paper. I've done so on fabric before but never on paper in this manner. Sewing a chain stitch on fabric is different from how I've sewn it on paper. I think the technique I used for the paper is a lot easier and perhaps can be used for sewing on fabric as well. Those who have done chain stitch on fabric before would understand what I'm trying to say here. I hope to be able to do a video tutorial on how to hand sew this chain stitch on paper this year. And perhaps do a simple running stitch tutorial as well while I'm at it. Will see how it goes. Time is always an issue with me. I need more of it! :)

I love how the card turned out in the end. I am planning on sending these cards to a few people this year for their birthday of course. Hope they like it! ;)