Hand-Lettering with Watercolor

For those of you who read my previous post 3 Tips for Setting Up Your Watercolor Palette, you already know that we’re taking our first watercolor classes through the Watercolor Summit. It’s our first time participating in the summit, and also our first time painting with watercolors. We’ve had so much fun watching the videos, looking forward to viewing them as we go through the classes over the next few months. The Watercolor Summit itself was two weeks, but we’ll have access to the classes for life!

While many of our classmates are just whizzing through the lessons, we are definitely taking our time with the different classes offered through the summit. We started off with Jenna Rainey where we learned all the fundamentals from setting up a watercolor palette to mixing our colors, and then we decided to skip to the last of the lessons because we were really intrigued by the idea of learning about hand-lettering with watercolor.

Our Watercolor Brush Lettering Class was taught by artist Nicole Miyuki Santo. You can check out Nicole’s website here. She also has a book that I’m looking forward to checking out as well.

For the class we picked up a 2/0 brush from Cheap Joe’s Art Supply and a $5 Artist Loft Fundamentals Watercolor Pan Set from Michael’s that the artist used for the class. While we love using our watercolors from the tubes because of their vibrant color values, we were excited to try out the watercolor palette that was suggested for learning hand-lettering.

One of the fundamentals of learning hand-letting is to learn the basic strokes and flourishes that you’ll use. If you’re newbies to watercolor and hand-lettering you’ll mostly likely recite the mantra ‘thin on the up, thick on the down’ while you’re getting your brain wrapped around the art of hand-lettering.

For those of you who are curious to know what kind of paper we used for this part of the Watercolor Summit, you can pick up the Strathmore Marker Paper at Cheap Joe’s or your local art supply store. It’s important that you can see through the paper since you’ll be doing ‘tracing’ during your initial hand-lettering practice pages.

Alphabet with brush on the left and with the watercolor brush pens on the right.

For the alphabet portion of the class we did our first practice run using our brush, and our second using the Akashiya Say Watercolor Brush Pens that I picked up several years ago but hadn’t had the chance to use yet. Because you know… Life.

It was soooo much easier not having to go back and forth to the palette for more paint. There was so much more fluidity to our brush strokes with the watercolor brush markers versus the brush we’d picked up.

I love how my mom’s turned out in the bright yellow brush pen, don’t you?

After we’d practiced our brush strokes and the alphabet, we moved onto the last part of the class which was creating our first hand-lettered saying. While we still have a way to go when it comes to perfecting our brush strokes for hand-lettering we are hands-down in favor of using the watercolor brush pens.