Part 7: A Few Little Things Good to Know
Letting the ink dry and your hand relax.
Before we move on to exploring different decorative lettering styles, there are just a few last practical tips that are incredibly helpful to keep in the back of our minds as we practise:
Give your ink time to sleep: If we are using pencil guidelines to keep our writing straight, let's never rush to rub them out. Depending on the pen you found around your house—especially gel pens or fine liners—the ink can take a minute to completely set. If we erase too quickly, it will smudge. Let your note sit for a few minutes while you make a cup of tea, and then gently rub out the pencil lines.
Watch out for colour bleeding: This is especially true when we start playing with decorative scripts. If you are outlining a bold word or drawing a decorative title and you want to colour it in, make sure you give that first layer of ink plenty of time to dry completely. If we rush in with a second colour or a marker too quickly, the inks can bleed into one another, muddying up our clean lines.
Relax your grip: When we are trying to make our writing look neat, our natural instinct is to squeeze the pen tightly. If your hand starts to ache, it means you are holding it too hard. Every few sentences, let's pause, wiggle our fingers, take a deep breath, and loosen our grip. A relaxed hand writes much smoother, gentler lines.
Keep a piece of scrap paper handy: Before we write on our final, beautiful card, let's always have a little piece of scrap paper next to us. Use it to scribble a few random loops or test your pen to make sure the ink is flowing smoothly and isn't going to blob on your first letter.