 to go over some handwriting things with you guys by Erin Young. I think Young is her last name. One of my subscribers and groupies over in Facebook, in the Facebook group, a life of art and self-expression, which is my Facebook group and the link should be in the description below. So when she suggested that, I thought, you know, it's probably a good idea. So I started keeping these kind of notebooks last year and I started with this alphabet one because it was something that Joanne Sharp does and she talked about in her life book lesson last year and it won't go over exactly, you know, what she recommended that we do and how we do it. You should go take one of her class. She's known for doing her artwork revolving around lettering and doing artistic lettering. So her name is Joanne Sharp. I'll try to remember to put her link in the description below but if I forget, somebody remind me. I thought it was such a good idea. I also have one for faces and so when I get the urge to try practicing drawing a particular kind of face, good or bad or faces in a different kind of medium, I practice it in here and like that's really bad and then I usually try to write, she's not bad, try to write notes like here, too squashed, weird hair, better, wide face, narrow chin, angled jaw, those are the things I kind of liked about that high eyebrow, thick bottom lip. So I've just practiced and when I take a face course from another artist like I have Jane Davenport's book as we all do and I, you know it's funny even when I'm doing her techniques, the girls you can still tell it's me that drew them. But yeah so I practiced those in here, too and you know pages of eyes and you know different facial features. So and I also have one for birds and creatures because I'd like to do different kinds of those and I've got to actually maybe leave this one out and do some work in it. So today we will work in the lettering one and I'm going to show you some things about how I do my lettering. I do recommend that you get something like this and put it together and just practice your lettering. This is the same way I do the negativity smackdown journals in that I covered the outside with some drop paper and I glued the first sheet to the front and back cover and then I glued every two pages together and in this case I edged it with washi tape. So I definitely would recommend just work in a composition book and make yourself some examples of lettering that you like. Alright that being said I'm just going to use two pens for this, a thicker one and a thinner one. So the thinner one is thicker than actually I normally use. This is something I got from JetPens. It says Tombow on it. WS-BS calligraphy pen. Everything else is in Japanese so I have no idea but it's one of those ones with like a hard nylon nib and then this is just a marker, a permanent marker from Lowe's, the hardware store and it's comparable to a Sharpie. It's got like a bullet tip. So the first thing we will do is just basic cursive and this isn't me even trying. This is just how this is my cursive. Oh see I forgot D. Oops. It's out of order now. D-E-F. This is hard to do and talk at the same time. I don't know what that little thing is. I didn't mean to put that there but this is just a practice book. So then what I do a lot of times that you see me do and this is just all lowercase but as you see me go back into the word and I pick part of the letter and generally it's the left side, something on the left, not always and I fatten it with a thicker marker, a little neater than what I'm doing now but you get you get the idea. That just gives you an interesting letter so then to do that as a word and you can do the same thing. I would do lowercase and uppercase. I would do both alphabets in your practice book. I'd write it like that now and do they even teach cursive in school anymore? I don't even know if they do. They probably don't. When I went to school we had to practice our cursive. It was a pain in the neck. I hated it. Now I'm glad the nuns made us learn. Yes I said nuns. I went to Catholic school. So then and that gives you just something that's interesting for your journal page yeah. So the other way that I do lettering and you know let's do a few capitals and see generally speaking when I'm doing cursive I I sometimes print my first letter except for my G's. This is how I generally write my G's not always but generally speaking. So you get the idea then you would go back into your letters with your fat pen. Really you're just making the marks that you use to make the letter more interesting by varying up your pen strokes and don't be afraid of your handwriting. There's nothing wrong with your handwriting. Just go with I mean it's unique to you so you should just practice it and then let's see let's do so you would do something like that which is interesting. So the other way that I do lettering and that I've been doing lettering since I started this whole process and just kind of happened by accident because I made a mistake on something honestly. So I take my letters I write them kind of long and thin and I take sometimes I do it with the same pen and I'll show you how I can do this. So then I take and I again it's about making an interesting mark and sort of doodling on your letter. Now I've done this on kind of thinner paper in some of my journals and because of how many how much like scrubbing with the pen there is like right there it bled through so you want to be careful about what you're doing this on and what you're doing it with. I don't think this is new to anybody and like I said it started out because I made a mistake on something and I had a line where I didn't want it so that well let me just fill it in and this is what we ended up with and you could definitely do it like this or you could really just take it and have a lot of fun with it and you could you know doodle in that space. It depends on how busy your background is in your journal you really want your lettering to stand out so sometimes if your background is really busy then you want to fill it in. If your background is kind of plain then maybe doodling because you want it to be all about the letters that would be interesting but the lettering the words on your journal pages should be just as interesting as the rest of your page I think yeah the other thing that I do with my lettering as I tend to stack it what do I mean by that so if you write like love I don't necessarily write it in a straight line and sometimes I'll take this one here and it's still readable as a word but it's presented in an artistic manner of course now I just messed up my e see that's how that whole filling in thing happened by mistake there we go so just play and have some fun with your lettering and practice I really do recommend Joanne Sharp and her lettering any of her classes you'll learn a lot about lettering from there also there is Lisa Engelbrich I think I've got her book somewhere I have a lot of books though so it's possible I can't find it it might be in the other room she's the daughter of Mary Engelbrich anyway she's passed away now but she might be on YouTube I'll try to find the spelling of her name and link it below so this is I hope Aaron what you are looking for this is really the three different ways that I do my lettering really you know practice do your whole abc a through z and practice with doing your shading in different places and see what you like practice stacking your letters on top of each other write different positive affirmation words and do do some doodling in your practice book and make yourself a custom reference book that's a great idea all right everybody don't forget to go out and have a great day do something nice for yourself because you deserve it support my YouTube channel by shopping in my Etsy shop or hitting the support button on my channel's main page that would be great all right that's it for right now I will see you all later bye