cursive – arts, ink.

Welcome back to Letters by Lydia! This week I’m gonna give you all a rundown of something called ribbon lettering, which looks a little something like this (you might recognize that last picture from last week!):

In my opinion, the easiest way to do ribbon lettering is to use something most you probably already have: a highlighter. My personal favorites are the zebra mildliners, but any old highlighter with a chisel tip like this will do! 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.

Satin Ribbons | Paper Source 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.

Once you feel comfortable with that, you’re pretty much good to go! This is definitely one of those things that gets easier with practice. I love doing this kind of lettering because it’s very formulaic and reliable, so it’s nice to use for notes headings or things like that, as well as some mind-numbing doodling. That said, there are a lot of options to spice it up! I illustrated a few below–as you can see, you can do this by just outlining the sections, or coloring in the shadowy parts, or both, like I mentioned before. But you can also do this in cursive or in print, outline and color in the shadows with the same color, a different color from your base, or a different color entirely. The options are really fun to play around with, so once you get the basics of it, enjoy playing around with all the different options!

Hopefully this was educational and made at least some sense! Please feel free to leave any other questions you have, and have a lovely week!

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 🙂

Tag: cursive

Letters by Lydia: Ribbon Lettering

Letters by Lydia: Cursive vs Calligraphy vs …?