As you’ve seen throughout our Cloth Paper Scissors Lettering Lessons, incorporating hand-drawn letters and numbers into mixed-media art can be done in an artful way that’s both personal and expressive. You can use these techniques for practical things like handmade cards, but you can also apply the methods to your art journaling and beyond. I’m a fan of how Jodi Ohl uses lettering in a way that allows the art itself to take center stage. Her letterforms are graphic elements on the page, meaningful on their own, and also adding to the bigger picture without distracting from it.
Jodi’s Lettering Lesson Volume Four focuses on creative cursive writing. Here’s a word from Jodi to inspire you further. ~Cherie
On Hand Lettering by Jodi Ohl
I used to be a little fearful of hand lettering. It’s easy to get caught up in comparing your work to the work of others who may be a bit more experienced, but doing so leads to feeling defeated in your own efforts. Hand lettering brings me a lot of joy when I’m playing in my journal, creating just for me, or working on simple projects like hand-drawn cards and gift tags. In this Art Lesson, I’ll illustrate how easy it is to create artful cursive hand lettering. With a bit of practice, you can quickly improve your techniques.
Here’s a mini-preview of this 37-page Lettering Lesson: Add doodles and embellishments around your letters and in splashes of color around them. Each colored area under the word will be a bit different, based on how you shaped your letters. I smoothed out the edge of the border, and then added dots, hearts, flowers, and a doodled border in pen and marker. Click to continue when you download this Lettering Lesson…