Hand Lettering: 4 Tips for Improving Shaky Lines. Even with the imperfect nature of hand lettering, there are still ways to improve your work!
Hand Lettering: 4 Tips for Improving Shaky Lines
One of the questions I am asked most frequently is “My lines are shaky! How do I make them smoother and/or more straight?”
For starters, anything done by hand will be at least a little bit imperfect. The imperfections and nuances that doing lettering by hand create are part of the charm.
Note for Beginners to Brush Calligraphy
I always recommend beginners start with a small-tipped brush pen. The Tombow Fudenosuke is perfect for learning. It comes in a hard tip and a soft tip. Get the combo pack of both and decide which you prefer…it’s different for everyone and it may change over time. I learned with the soft tip and now usually reach for the hard tip.
Photo via my Instagram account @bydawnnicole
Hand Lettering: 4 Tips for Improving Shaky Lines
Even with the imperfect nature of hand lettering, there are still ways to improve your work. Since “How do I get my lines less shaky?” is a FAQ, I sat down and came up with 4 Tips for Improving Shaky Lines.
Note: Shaky lines are problematic for most of us. Study the work of your favorite letterers on Instagram carefully! Can you find shaky lines? Yep! That’s because doing things by hand will never be perfect. We’re harder on ourselves than anyone else, so we notice it in our own work but aren’t as likely to notice it in other people’s work.
Lettering is not a race. You see many hand-letterers, myself included, share time-lapsed videos on social media. This is a sped up video that doesn’t accurately portray how slow the lettering is done in real time (mostly because it would be too boring to post a long lettering video in real time).
Especially when you’re first starting out with brush lettering, you put so much mental energy into using light pressure for your upstrokes, and heavy pressure for you downstrokes. Slowing down will help immensely. Speed will come with time and practice.
Tip Two: Practice to Improve Your Muscle Memory
You’ve probably heard of muscle memory as it relates to athletics, but the some concept applies with hand lettering. The basic concept of muscle memory is that more you practice a motor skill, the more it becomes ingrained into your muscle memory. A skill becomes easier to you and you typically do it better as your muscle memory grows. So this is just another reason to practice daily. You will see your lines start to improve due to muscle memory.
I like to keep all my sketch books and look back and see how much I’ve improved each year…it’s really amazing and motivating to track your progress in this way!
Tip Three: Change Angles!
This may seem like a no-brainer but it’s a simple tip many people overlook. It’s ok to change the angle of your paper to make the upstrokes and downstrokes easier to create.
Tip Four: Use a Guard Sheet.
I’m a lefty so I originally started doing this to protect my work and my hand. But I realized it also helps my hand glide across the paper more easily which enables me to make smoother lines, especially with flourishing.
Photo via my Instagram Stories @bydawnnicole
Want more hand lettering tips, tutorials, and free practice sheets?
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Deebi27 says
March 18, 2017 at 3:52 amYou simply are awesome, generous, and sooo sincere! Thank you!
Alyce says
March 20, 2017 at 8:31 amThank you very much! I need to make time to practice.
Cheryl Rotnem says
April 25, 2017 at 9:10 amDawn,
Another great tip I learned months ago, was to use a playing card, do to the slickness of it, it has been a Godsend for me in my dip pen calligraphy! Just wanted to share that with you.