How to Practice Brush Lettering the Right Way

When you’re starting to practice brush lettering, you wanna jump ahead and start writing words right away. You see all these beautiful brush lettering accounts on Instagram and you keep thinking “how did they get this good?”

Well, the answer is actually pretty simple: they practiced a lot before they got good. They started with the basics just like every beginner does. No one was born knowing how to create brush lettering. This is isn’t about talent. It’s about practice.

If you want to learn how to practice brush lettering the right way, this is the perfect guide for you. In this article, I’ll teach you how to practice brush lettering the right way, so you don’t ruin your brush pens just like I did in the beginning.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means if you happen to purchase something, I’ll make a small commission at no extra cost to you! See my full disclosure here.

What You’ll Need

– Any brush pen

– Tracing paper

– Another type of paper that won’t ruin your brush pens

Before we begin….

Getting good at brush lettering won’t happen overnight. You won’t be able to master it in just one practice session. It takes a lot of patience, and yes, sometimes you will get bored and you will start doubting yourself. You’ll think you’re not making any progress. But I can guarantee, if you follow these steps I’m about to show you – you’re going to make progress every day.

With that being said, it will also not take you years and years of learning. It really depends on the amount of practice you’re putting in every day. You can practice for 15 minutes a day, an hour or whatever its that you can fit in your day. You can learn in a month, a couple of months…it really is up to you. Just remember that the more you practice, the more you’ll make progress and get better at it.

Now that that’s out the way, let’s get started!

Practice the Basic Strokes

Start practicing brush lettering the right way! The first thing you need to do when practicing brush lettering is to learn about the basic strokes. These are the fundamental rules about brush lettering. Each letter will use one or more of these basic strokes and you’ll understand better how the letters are built.

I know that we always want to go to the next step soon enough, but I promise you that if you stick with practicing the basic strokes first, your letters will be much better when you start practicing them.

Practice Letters

If you think that you’ve practiced the basic strokes long enough (meaning that your strokes aren’t that shaky anymore, especially the upstrokes), you can go ahead and start practicing your letters.

Grab a sheet of tracing paper and start tracing those letters away! At first, keep tracing the letters over and over again. The second step is just copying the letters while looking at them, in a different paper. This is going to help you build muscle memory. This time, don’t trace it, just copy them! you can either use a tracing paper or any other papers that are used specifically for brush pens.

After practicing them by looking at them, you should start practicing the letters without any reference to look at. Doing that will help you figure out if you’ve built that muscle memory and will, help you understand which letters you’re struggling with and which ones you’ve already mastered!

Practice the letter connections

So you’re done practicing letters! It’s now time to start working on the letters connections. You can start by looking at some words and trying to practice just two letter connections. This will give you a feel on how to start writing words!

Practice Words

The next step on your journey to practice brush calligraphy is to start writing letters. Yes, we’re finally here! Where we wanted to be since the beginning. So now you can start practicing some words. I really recommend starting with words such as “minimum” and “aluminum” because they contain most of the basic strokes! And then you can just start practicing whatever word you’d like to!

Practice Quotes

The final step on your brush calligraphy practice should be writing longer phrases instead of writing just words. You’ll be able to practice not only writing words but working on layouts and compositions. You’ll be able to figure out if you want to write small words or big words and mix them together for a variety of different brush lettering pieces.

Are you struggling with anything while practicing brush lettering? Let me know in the comments so I can help you!