Hi again! I’m not sure how much this drawing counts as “people watching”, but who says “people” has to mean “strangers”? I’ve been spending a lot of time this past week opposite my friends just studying and I think today’s post portrays that rather accurately. Drawing on notebook paper instead of my sketchbook felt particularly fitting. The top image took place in the LSA building (where I spent six and a half hours today), and the bottom was in my friend’s apartment. I loved noticing how much stuff we surround ourselves with while studying: laptops, tablets, water bottles, my two indispensable pens, so many notebooks, planners, and… a french press? I suppose caffeine is a must. Good luck to everyone taking exams this week (I know I’ll need it)!
When it comes to actually using this technique, the first thing you need to do is make sure you’re holding the highlighter the right way. Instead of holding it like you would to highlight a something, where it draws a thick line horizontally, you want it to be the opposite way; once you’ve rotated your pen so you’re holding it correctly, it will draw a thin horizontal line and a thick vertical line. Then you can start writing! You want to keep your pen oriented that same way the whole time, because that’s what will give you this kind of 3D/layered ribbon effect. Another tip is to keep your strokes simple, especially when you’re first starting out. For example, instead of writing a lowercase “a” like you would in your normal handwriting, it might be easier to write it as a circle connected to a vertical line.
The next step is figuring out the “layers”, so to speak. For this part, it’s super helpful to think of what an actual ribbon would look like. In this photo I got from the Papersource website, you get a really good sense of what I mean by the layers of the ribbon.When trying to figure this out with your own letters, you want to look for junctions where there’s some overlap, which I tried to illustrate in the diagrams below. For ribbon lettering, there are a ton of options in terms of style, so you can either outline the sections of each letter, color in the “shadowy” parts, or do both! I showed both examples so you can get a sense of how they each work.
The tips are flexible, but also incredibly easy to control, which earns them major points. As for durability, these are pretty decent. If you aren’t using paper specifically for handlettering, the tips will fray faster, but that’s true of most pens. As for the colors, they’re beautiful–very pigmented and rich. 
They offer a wide range of colors between all the sets, which you can see even just in the ones I have; there’s the super light pastels all the way to the deep, rich hues. That said, I wish they offered a higher quantity of different colors. For example, they have tons of different blue/green shades, but only one red between all of the sets. The price depends a lot on where you get them and what colors/size you choose, but a set of 6 is about $10-12 and a set of 10 is about $15-20.