Hand Lettering - Faux Calligraphy
Calligraphy, which contrasts thin and thick strokes within letters and words, is particularly popular with hand letterers. The faux calligraphy technique uses simple fineliners to imitate the effect of calligraphy. There are a couple of rules you will need to follow to ensure that your end result looks good! We show you how to conjure up faux calligraphy hand lettering easily using pigment liners.
An article by Lea
Traditional calligraphy plays with the contrast between thin and thick strokes within letters. In faux calligraphy we fake this effect by duplicating our downward strokes, so that they look thicker than the upward strokes. Remember – keep upward strokes (strokes created by the upward motion of the pen when writing) thin. And duplicate downward strokes (strokes created by the downward motion of the pen)!
First, write out your word using your pigment liner in cursive script lettering. Make sure the letters are wide enough and that your loops (in letters such as h or l, for example) are as big as possible.
Now duplicate all the downward strokes by drawing a second line with the pigment liner. Be careful to do this on the same side of all your stem strokes. So if you start with the first letter by duplicating the left hand side of the original stroke, do the same with all the other letters.
Now fill in the space created by the duplicate strokes. If you want to achieve a traditional calligraphy effect, just fill in the whole of the space with the pigment liner.
You can also play with decorative elements, for instance by drawing little patterns such as stripes within the spaces, or adding metallic highlights by colouring in the spaces with the metallic marker.
- pigment liners: the thinner the point you choose and the smaller the line width, the more delicate your hand lettering will be. For faux calligraphy we recommend a line width of between 0.3 and 0.7 mm.
- metallic markers: you can use metallic markers to add lovely touches of colour to your faux calligraphy letters.
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