Lettering with an oblique calligraphy pen and nib

Hi everyone -Hope you're all well! And a very happy pre-Veteran's Day!

I wanted to share this post on how I created some lettering for my most recent piece for the Make Art That Sells course, by Lilla Rogers. We are now in week 4, of a 5 week online course, but last week was on Scrapbooking.

The scrapbook page I created for MATSB

Because I was working very swiftly due to a self-imposed deadline of Thursday night for my piece, I broke out my trusty lettering tools to play with and create icons. A very quick background about me, I had the great pleasure of working as a Professional Lettering Artist for American Greetings right out of college many years ago, and was able to glean so much from that wonderful experience. I still to this day find such peace in creating letters, though I am very rusty at proper miniscules (lowercase letterform) and majuscules (uppercase, or large letterforms).

Anyway, for this piece, I sketched most of the icons and lettering in pencil, and then inked them on vellum or tracing paper, though tracing paper buckles unfortunately. I also just played with the ink and oblique pen and lettered phrases in my own handwriting, as well as drew with the pen freeform icons and squiggles as well.

Tools/material: I used pencils, laser paper, tracing paper, and Canson Vellum, with Higgins Eternal black ink, and an oblique pen holder with Hunt Artist's Pen Nibs (Extra Fine #22)

Here are a bunch of my lettering pens and nibs

sketch in pencil

poodle inked with oblique pen and Hunt nib on vellum..can you see the pencil sketch underneath?

Here you can see the pencil sketch sheet showing underneath the inked vellum sheet

Some very terrible freehand letterforms

some freehand handwriting, mistakes, and revised "bon"'s

I didn't use these, but the same idea was here, which was to sketch in pencil first, then ink on vellum

I decided to sketch in pencil with a little more precision.

Here is a sheet of inked icons and words on vellum. Feathers and scribbles were freeform as I was just playing with the tools.

My daughter kindly video'ed myself using the tools..I wanted to just share the angle that I draw at, and how you can get really neat thicks and thins using the fun oblique pen holder. I hope you try it sometime!