If you’re looking for the perfect gift for the hand lettering and/or calligraphy aficionado in your life or if you’re a hand lettering artist yourself and you’re trying to experiment with new material, this article is for you. This is the perfect hand lettering and calligraphy guide for any time of the year!
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Hand Lettering and Calligraphy Gift Guide
Tombow Dual Brush Pen 96 Color Set
This Tombow Dual Brush Pen 96 Color Set is the absolute dream! Whether you want to use it for coloring, brush lettering or use it as a watercolor alternative, this box set is perfect. These pens come with two different tips on each side: a brush tip and a fine tip of the same color. The brush tip is flexible enough and you can use the fine tip to finish up smaller areas! The amazing thing about these brush pens is that they’re water-based, so all the colors can be blended together and you can use them as watercolors too!
If you’re just starting your lettering journey and you don’t want to spend tons of money just yet, you can get this set created specifically with beginners in mind! Each set includes two Dual Brush Pens, a Fudenosuke Calligraphy Pen, a MONO Twin Permanent Marker, a Pencil, and an Eraser.
The Sakura Pigma Micron pens are some of my favorites! I have both the black pen set and the colored ones and I love all of them! This particular set comes with eight pens, each with a different tip size or style (ranging from 0.2-mm to 0.8-mm, a brush pen, and a graphic 1 pen.) These pens come with archival ink, which means they’re waterproof, dry quickly, and don’t bleed!
Sakura Pigma Micron Colored Pen Set
Following the black pen set from Sakura, you could also get the colored set! It comes in 8 different colors such as black, red, blue, green, brown, purple, sepia, and rose. These pens also come with archival ink, and they’re great if you’re looking to add color to your lettering pieces.
Sakura Gelly Roll Pens Gift Set
I could not contain myself when I found out about this gift set through an Instagram post. I already knew about the gelly roll pens but I didn’t realize they had so many colors and I also had no idea they sell all of these together. This set comes with 74 different colors and different styles: they have solid colors, metallic colors, gold/silver shadow, and many more!
The Sakura Gelly Roll white pens are great for lettering on black paper or other colored papers like the Canson Color Plus Paper. It’s also great for adding details like highlights or other types of decorations to your letters.
These pens are amazing for beginners because they’re not as flexible as other pens, plus they have a small tip which makes them so much easier to control.
For the longest time, Tombow only produced these pens with black ink. But after a while, they launched these pens in other colors! This set comes in 10 different colors (including the original black color, so you don’t have to purchase it separately). They’re great if you want to write small letters and are also one of the pens I recommend for beginners. They also come in pastel colors and neon colors.
The Pentel touch brush pens are also great for beginners and for smaller brush lettering. They have two more colors than the Tombow set, as they come in 12 different colors.
Looking for a pen to do detailed work with? Then this Stabilo set is perfect. They come in 40 different colors with a fine tip that is incredible for really small and/or detailed pieces.
Do you want to color your pieces faster? These pens from Stabilo are great for coloring lettering work because they are felt-tip pens and are increasingly larger than the fine-tip ones. This set comes in 30 different colors!
The Rhodia Notebook is perfect to use with brush pens because the paper they use is incredibly smooth and won’t fray or ruin your brush pens. (psst. I have another article on why you should never use printer paper with your brush pens and lots of other paper recommendations)
This sketchbook comes with thick paper that is perfect for different kinds of media such as watercolors, permanent markers, inks, felt tip marks, and so on!
The Sharpie permanent markers are perfect for writing on paper, plastic, metal, and other surfaces. The only thing I advise is that when writing on a paper, make sure it’s thicker paper, or else it will bleed through. Plus they’re alcohol-based and can have a pretty heavy smell. But they’re great if you need something permanent. They come in sets of fine points for good coverage and ultra-fine point for more detailed work.
I simply adore the Posca Markers as they can also write on basically any surface! They’re water-based markers and they don’t bleed even if the paper isn’t very thick (as long as you don’t use many layers of ink).
I have struggled to find a good liquid chalk marker, cause I wanted a really opaque and bright color and none of the chalk markers I tested would deliver it. That was until I find out about the Kassa Chalk Markers. They’re just what I wanted, really juicy, opaque, and amazing bright colors.
If you’re on a budget, don’t worry! You can get really valuable things from inexpensive products like the Crayola Broad Markers. I know it can come as a surprise since they’re school supplies, but even though they’re not brush pens, you can get the same effect with them and they’re also great for beginners. You can absolutely create calligraphy with these pens (and I teach you how you can do just that here)! You can either get the broad markers set (big tips) or the super tips set (small tips).
Books
If you’re anything like me, books are a precious gift. Here’s a list of a few books that I’ve read and recommend for any lettering artist:
- In Progress by Jessica Hische
- Lettering Manual by Ken Barber
- The Golden Secrets of Lettering by Martina Flor
- The Art of Hand Lettering for Beginners by Joanna Muñoz
- Mastering Hand-Lettering by Mye De Leon
- Vintage Hand Lettering by Lisa Quine
- The Complete Book of Chalk Lettering by Valerie McKeehan
- Brush Pen Lettering Practice Book by Grace Song
- Brush Lettering from A to Z by Emma Witte
I remember when I first joined Skillshare a few years ago and there were only a few handfuls of hand lettering and calligraphy classes. Now there are tons of lettering and calligraphy courses. I highly recommend signing up for a free trial so you can check out some of the classes and see what fits you best. They’re always adding more and more classes so the price is totally worth it. Plus you can learn many other skills since they’re not only craft-related.
If you struggle with lettering composition (trust me, it’s a thing we all go through), Stefan Kunz and Ian Barnard have created an awesome solution for all letterers. They created a composition bundle with different grids and compositions that will make your life and your lettering pieces so much easier. You can use the pre-composed grids or you can combine different ones to fit your piece.
Stefan and Ian’s Letter Builder
To accompany the grid builder, Stefan and Ian teamed up to create the Letter Builder! It helps you draw letters consistently as it features builders for light, regular, bold, and condensed letters.
Wanna go digital? Since the launch of the iPad Pro, many hand lettering artists have been using it as a tool to advance their lettering skills and create much faster! And now you can even get the newer iPads since Apple made the Apple Pencil compatible with their latest releases and you don’t have to get the most expensive iPad. The iPad Air is also perfect if you’re on a budget.
Wacom One Creative Display Tablet
Not ready to commit to an iPad yet? The Wacom tablet is a great alternative for digital lettering. It doesn’t work the same way as the iPad, since you’ll need a computer and drawing software to use it.
Hand Lettering and Calligraphy Gift Guide Wrap-up
You simply cannot go wrong with any of these gifts listed here. If you’re getting a gift for a loved one who happens to love hand lettering or calligraphy, and they’re pen/stationary aficionados like me, they’re gonna enjoy anything from this list! Speaking from experience, I like any gifts someone could give me, especially if they have anything to do with lettering or art in general.
You can choose to combine different brands, you can gift them books or digital goodies. There are just so many options that you can choose from. Anything that has to do with creativity just makes my eyes sparkle, so I hope it can do the same for the person you’re gifting it to. Even if that person is yourself!
