My Top Black Inks

Plus you’ll also learn about different types of ink and which aren’t vegan

03 December 2017 · 3234 words · 11 minute read

This is post 7 of 10 in the series “Calligraphy 101”

Me and black ink have a pretty strong bond and somewhat of a long history. Back in my school days I got/had to use fountain pens every day and I’m gonna be honest, I just never liked the default royal blue. That was before Social Media and before I learned about this wonderfully amazing thing we call Online Shopping so all I knew was a very limited palette of ink, notably Royal Blue (urgh), Dark Green (not allowed in School), Red (loved it, also prohibited), Pink (my top favorite, but also not okay in school) and black (OMG, it’s allowed to use, it’s not freaking royal blue and it’s kinda awesome!). Me and black ink were a pretty big thing and if you look at old notebooks of mine, before all of my dark reds and burgundies and turquoise they are pretty much exclusively written in black. So to say that me and black ink go way back is a bit of an understatement, since it’s basically been with me for most of my life, since I was around 8 years old. But black and me in Calligraphy didn’t have the easiest of starts, because I tried a lot of inks I didn’t like. That has changed now though.
So let’s talk about my Top 5 (alright, it’s 6…) Black inks. But first we’ll dive a bit into different types of inks you can get nowadays and learn all about the differences. When I shared some information about this on Instagram a while ago I was contacted by a few vegans who were a bit surprised but also really thankful because they hadn’t realized that those paints were not animal-product-free. I personally eat meat and am thus not a vegan, but since I know a bunch of people in this lettering community are, this might be helpful to you. And I think it’s generally very interesting.
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PVC Pipe Pen Storage

Pinterest Made Me Do It

28 November 2017 · 922 words · 3 minute read

So a while ago I stumbled upon PVC Pipe Pen Storage Solutions on Pinterest. It’s a pretty popular solution for storing Copic Markers, which like any marker actually, should be stored lying down, instead of standing. The whole horizontal pen storing was something I wanted to look into since I had noticed that my Tombows were starting to feel dried out sometimes, but as soon as I laid them down a bit, they felt a lot better. So this was my main inspiration to go look for alternatives, thus my hour-long browsing on Pinterest. So after a couple hours of research I decided to lock in the following weekend for this pen storage project. This is how it went down.
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Wax Seals 2.0

A guest post to be found at thepigeonletters.com

05 November 2017 · 185 words · 1 minute read

I wrote a guest post at my friend peggy’s blog. It’s all about wax seals. Go check the link after this little teaser!

You might live under a rock, but if you are a default millennial living the 21st century life with an interest in arts and craft chances are, you’ve found yourself on Instagram more often than you are sometimes willing to acknowledge. Instagram’s Lettering Community is like many others, a bunch of enablers, stationary lovers, with slight tendencies to hoarding and an ever-changing, ever-evolving common obsession. Last year we were all about embossing, forget that now. 2017 is all about wax seals! Yeah, the old school technique kings used to sign documents, well kind of – there have been a few upgrades here and there. In case you have not fallen down the rabbit hole, you probably will want to after this post (not making any promises, but that’s the way it was for me), or if you have, but everyone is sick of getting mail from you (how can they?!) you’ll find a couple new ideas here.

Go read on

Get Better Hairlines

instantly & long term

01 November 2017 · 1333 words · 4 minute read

This is post 6 of 10 in the series “Calligraphy 101”

We all love them. We all crave them. We all want to achieve suuuper thin hairlines. When I first saw delicate calligraphy written with a 303 nib I was in awe! But how on earth was I supposed to achieve that when I was so heavy-handed? Well, I decided to work on it and less than a year later, hairlines is what people most often compliment me on. Today I want to share a few tips that I’ve learned to make hairlines thinner and prettier.
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Vectorizing Workflow Battle

The Letter Vector Smackdown

24 October 2017 · 1467 words · 5 minute read

I like vectorizing, even though I haven’t done it in a while. I really fell in love with the Pen tool, when I made my font almost two years ago (aka, when I hadn’t actually learned how to letter yet) but I haven’t really done a lot of vector work since then because I very rarely feel the need to vectorize. The thing is, if I want to create work for print I create my piece at a very high resolution in the first place thus I don’t have to save any piece from being pixelated. And since I’ll usually create production work on the iPad anyways which comes with an “embedded cleanup” I feel like I’m good. I’ll do vectorizing for my wax seal designs, but these are usually done very quickly since they are being etched so small. So bear in mind that I am rusty. However, I asked if you guys wanted a post on this on Instagram and you voted yes. So here it is. The vectorizing tool smackdown! Continue reading “Vectorizing Workflow Battle”

Let’s talk Words

How Hand Lettering is not Calligraphy but Calligraphy is Lettering but neither is a Font because both are not Type

18 October 2017 · 1513 words · 5 minute read

This is post 5 of 10 in the series “Calligraphy 101”

Words are confusing, especially when it comes to those “mushy” terms where no one is really sure what they actually mean. You guys know I am crazy about research, you know I love to write, I also am a gigantic word-fanatic so this is a subject I have been spending a lot of time with. I get the question whenever I make a comment about the fact that I am bad at Hand Lettering and prefer Calligraphy.

So then I try to break it down, try to explain it as shortly as possible but – hell I write novels for a reason. I have a hard time cutting myself short. But let’s just look at those words and see how successful I am at keeping it reasonably compact today.

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