Belinda Love Lee, one of Lettering Tutorials ‘Lettering Legends’ has just launched her first Skillshare class, ‘Digitize Your Own Calligraphy: From Logo to Letterpress’. If you’ve ever looked at Belinda’s portfolio you’ll see a lot of her work uses a calligraphic style, and her new class focuses on calligraphy. Along with calligraphy the class also explores digitisation, and taking your work to letterpress.
I’ve watched all of the class videos as I’m a big fan of Belinda’s work. It’s very interesting to see what her working process is like. I also wanted to be able to give you a good idea of what you can expect to learn from Belinda’s class.
The class isn’t lengthy at just under half an hour long, making it easy to schedule time for. The content inside of the class, if you follow along, will definitely keep you occupied though!
Tools
The class looks into calligraphy materials and tools, and doesn’t overwhelm you with a great long list of equipment to use. Belinda keeps things simple by just talking about two different types of calligraphy pen. She explains their differences, and mentions one calligraphy nib. Like with learning any type of lettering, it is important to explore different tools and not just limit yourself to one. That way you can find the one that works best for you. It is always very helpful to know of a starting tool though, then expand from there.
Practice
Belinda covers practice, again keeping things simple by demonstrating a couple of different letters to repeat, along with some different strokes of the pen to repeat too. This is incredibly similar to the techniques I wrote about recently in ‘Brush Lettering For Beginners Part Two: Techniques’. So if you’d like to know a little bit more about practice technique, feel free to have a look at the brush lettering article.
Digitisation
The digitisation part of the class feels very smooth. Belinda walks you through how she moves her work from paper to her computer, techniques for getting lettering to look crisp, and then moves onto using Illustrator. I’ve worked my way through a couple of lettering courses that include digitisation, and I didn’t think I’d pick up anything new. I was wrong! I picked up a couple of new tips that I can apply to any kind of lettering digitisation.
Letterpress
Towards the end of the class Belinda discusses taking work to print, and primarily focuses on letterpress print. You can really see her passion about letterpress products shine through in this part of the class. It is very clear that she talks about letterpress because it’s something she’s interested in, not just because ‘it’s what designers should know about’.
The class doesn’t cover every single detail you’d probably need to know about calligraphy, but it does keep things very simple, clear and easy to understand. It provides a really great starting point for learning calligraphy, which you can then expand upon as you build more confidence in this skill.
Belinda has kindly provided Lettering Tutorial with a special link, that will get you a month free if you’re not already a member of Skillshare. So if you’d like to get a free month just click / tap here!
