Calligraphy Tutorial: Chalkboard Lettering

I have been getting fancy with addressing letters and put together a simple tutorial on how to make your calligraphy look like hand written chalk board letters.  


This technique can also be applied to fabric, but use Pigma Pens for permanent letters of quilt cotton.  Lots of sizes are available.  I like .05 size a lot.

Here are a few simple steps.  If you try it, let me know how it went for you.

1)  Write out the letters using handwriting on a dark piece of paper.

I used dark navy blue paper that I got from PaperSource and a white pen that I also got from there.  The specific pen I used is the uni-ball signo broad pigment ink in UM-153, white.  It is easy to control and did not cost a lot.

Some of the letters had some curly starts and stops.  Those are not very hard to make, but it's good to practice on a scratch piece of paper



2)  Put a second line to the right of your letters only when your pen stroke is going down.  Don't do this if you pen is moving up towards the top of the paper.  See the example of the letter H below.  In the second photo, you can see a lot of letters with the 2nd lines added.

3)  Fill in ink between the lines.  Use light small strokes of the pen.  Go slowly, don't rush or you'll end up with extra ink on there and it will get messy

4)  At this point you can drop it in the mail and the person will eventually get it. 

I conducted a test and addressed a letter with non-fancy writing and another with fancy writing.  The one with fancy writing took an extra 3 days to get there.  I think it may have been because the automatic postal system could not recognize the address and a person may have had to read it in order for it to get to the right postal delivery person.  Just an interesting data point for you.

5)  Making it look like a chalk board for digital use:  If you want your photo to take on that chalk board look, just snap a picture of it on your phone and put it in black and white.  On iPhone, you can go into your photos, choose 'edit' then choose 'tonal' filter.  You can also try the 'mono' filter to see which one you like better.

6)  Putting text on top such as the "Easy Calligraphy Tutoral" text above:  If this is something you also want to add for a blog post or for a Pinterest tutoral pin, you can download an app called "Over".  It looks like this app is made for iOS.

Good luck!