Happy Wednesday, y’all!
Today we’re gonna take a bit of a deep dive into the terminology for different types of lettering. Overall, it really doesn’t matter, but I would say the most common question when it comes to lettering is “isn’t it just cursive?” If you don’t know the difference either, no worries! Hopefully this clears things up 🙂
So what’s cursive? I’m sure most of you are aware of what cursive actually is, but things probably get a little foggy in terms of how it differs from other forms of lettering. The main difference is that cursive isn’t really a form of art and instead a style of writing. Cursive is supposed to be a way of writing that’s more efficient than regular writing because your pen never has to leave the page–in other words, it’s practical and more of a fancy-looking shortcut than anything. It’s also much more rigid in terms of style and rules; there’s a cursive alphabet that, aside from a few stylistic variations, is pretty set in stone.
Lettering (synonymous with handlettering), on the other hand, is an umbrella term for all sorts of word art. Calligraphy, which falls under the lettering category, is probably the most similar to cursive. There’s a lot of different kinds of calligraphy, but it’s typically based loosely on cursive, and is centered on the idea of using strokes (you can check out my post on upstrokes and downstrokes to learn more about that!). Unlike cursive, calligraphy is much more flexible and can involve a lot of experimentation or style variation, which in my opinion makes it a lot more fun. You can see my version of a calligraphy alphabet below, and then I also included potential variations of uppercase letters (A) and lowercase letters (I chose “r” because it has a lot of fun options). Some people also refer to this as modern calligraphy, because calligraphy can also refer to the sort of gothic style that would use a pen and ink or some sort of pen with a nib.
Lettering in general essentially just means “drawing letters” in an artistic way. This means that instead of adhering to strict rules like cursive, or requiring the use of strokes like calligraphy, lettering can be any creative depiction of letters. For example, bubble letters would fall under the lettering category, because instead of using lines and strokes to create a letter, you’re using shapes.
There are pretty much limitless other categories that fall under the umbrella of lettering, but some other common ones include brushlettering, which I’ve talked a lot about, faux calligraphy, serif and sans serif, gothic, and tons of other ones. Hopefully that helps clear up any confusion, but feel free to leave any other questions in the comments!
Have a lovely rest of the week everyone 🙂
The basics all come down to upstrokes and downstrokes. Upstrokes are thin lines that use just the very tip of the brush pen, and they start from the bottom and go in an upwards direction (as the name implies). Downstrokes, again, what a shocker, start at the top and go in a downward motion. These are thicker lines because they involve using more pressure on the pen. I demonstrated this with the pictures below, using my favorite brush pens, Karin brushmarker pros.
Once you get these basic strokes down, you can start experimenting with more complicated strokes. I’m not sure who originally came up with this set of strokes to practice, but I know I’ve seen @thehappyevercrafter and @ensigninsights use these on Instagram (highly recommend their accounts, especially for beginners!). In any case, these are essentially the core kinds of strokes or lines you’ll need to be comfortable making, because they appear in a lot of letters.
Here’s your basic lower-case, cursive “a”. To make this, you actually have to use two strokes (shown in the picture), meaning you pick up your pen once in between. For the first stroke, the oval-ish shape, you start where I put the little 1 in a circle. From there, you start with an upstroke, then transition into a downstroke, and finish off with another upstroke that connects to the first. Then, you pick up your pen, and begin stroke two! This one is a lot easier–start at the same height as the top of your oval, and just go straight down, then kind of flick your pen back up for that final upstroke. I’m not going to guide you through every letter because we’d be here forever, but I did include a little sheet I drew of all the letters and some guiding arrows for each of the strokes involved. I also color-coded them, so the stroke you start with is in red, followed by a yellow stroke, and on a few letters there’s a third stroke which is in blue. Of course, there are tons of styles for writing the alphabet, and every lettering artist does it a bit different, but this is how I tend to do it!
