White Inks are a whole subject of their own. A while ago I wrote about black inks and the different types of inks available, so I’ll just reference you to that for this kind of information. This time round, I dug out all of the white inks I had available (and bought some new ones) to give you an ultimate white ink showdown.
Continue reading “Whiteout: White Ink Showdown”
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.
Continue reading “My Top Black Inks”
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.
Continue reading “Get Better Hairlines”
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”
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.
I know as a beginner, especially when you’re not really sure if Calligraphy is really your thing any kind of investment is worth one or two thoughts. You don’t want to spend a ton of money, unless you’re sure. So what route should you go? Get everything cheap? Get everything good, so you really know it’s not the tools that are bad? Here’s a – slightly opinionated – post where saving is fine and when splurging might make a really big difference.
This time I promise to cut myself short!