How to Create Watercolor Calligraphy

Hello and welcome to Little Coffee Fox. Today I am going to show you how to use watercolors to create beautiful brush lettering. Before you start, you need to make sure you gather the correct materials. You'll need thick paper like cardstock or watercolor paper, brush pens like the Pentel Aquash pens, watercolors, and water. I'll list all the materials that I'm using here in the description down below. Now I'm not going to get into the specifics of how to brush letter. I'll link to a post down below if you want to learn more about that. But the basic principle is to apply more pressure on the downstroke than on the upstroke. You'll notice I'm primarily using a water brush pen. That's because I really like being able to control the amount of water by squeezing the barrel, which presses the water out onto the brush. And I also like the feel in my hand. It feels more natural than an actual paintbrush. So the first technique that I'm showing you is a really simple one starting off really easy. Make sure that your paintbrush or your water brush is nice and wet. You wet your palette. I'm using the Finetec Gold palette. Then pick up a single color and letter it on. Nothing to it. This is about as dry as you can get with watercolor lettering without getting the dry bristly effect. You'll figure out how to find that balance when you play with your brush pens or your paintbrushes. It just takes a little bit of getting used to to figure out the level of water that you need. If you decide after you're done lettering something that you want to add more pigment, then you can just grab more pigment from your palette and add it in if the letter is still wet. This next technique is really popular with watercolor lettering and it's a really cool, unique watercolor effect. All you do is you start with one color as you're lettering and then as you add more letters you pick up more colors and slowly create a mixture of colors on the page. You can do similar colors. You can do opposite colors. It's really up to you. You can do a rainbow if you want. Just make sure that you move pretty quickly with watercolor because once it dries on the page it makes it much more difficult to mix the pigment in and then you have to go trace over like I did here. If your lettering is wet enough whenever you put down the first layer then you can go back over with a second color and pop in little dashes of another color. Then the second color will blend into the first one with a really neat wet on wet soft effect. This next technique is a bit more difficult but it's really cool if you can pull it off. Squeeze the barrel of your water brush aggressively and letter out a word. The word should be incredibly wet and the water should be standing on top of the page. Then just grab some pure concentrated pigment. I'm using Dr. P.H. Martin's hydrous watercolors. Then just touch the pigment to the water and it will spread out and mix in a beautiful unique way. One of the reasons this technique is so difficult is because it's kind of hard to see what you're lettering and you'll see here in a moment that I accidentally dot the wrong pillar for my eye but with a little bit of practice you should be able to figure out what you're doing pretty quickly. This is a really fun technique and while it might not be the easiest thing ever, it is so rewarding because watching that pigment spread out in the water is just magical. Like I said earlier, you can use a regular paintbrush for brush lettering. It does feel a little bit different though because it's so thin. It's not as thick and robust in your hand as a pen is so it feels a little bit weird to write with. But once you get over that it's not too bad for creating cool lettering. One of the things that's the most difficult about using actual bristled brush tips for lettering is figuring out what angle to write with because with a brush pen that doesn't have bristles like a Tombow, you have to hold it at a pretty steep 45 degree angle so you can get those thick downstrokes and those thin upstrokes but with a paintbrush or a bristle tip pen you lose control whenever you hold it so far over. But you can't hold it straight up and down because then you won't get the cool thick downstrokes that you want in this technique. So you have to hold it at a delicate maybe 20 degree angle. It takes a bit of practice to find what's perfect for lettering and it's different for every pen. Really the best advice I can give for mastering this technique is to practice with it and really feel out your materials and work with it before you give up. So to summarize, basically to master watercolor brush lettering you need to figure out the amount of water that you want, figure out the amount of pigment that you want, and with those two you really should be able to come up with a bunch of different unique cool effects. And while any watercolors will work, I definitely would suggest you take a look at Dr. Ph Martin's liquid watercolors because wow they are amazing for lettering. They're so smooth and bright and concentrated and they're just incredible. I love them. I'm so glad that I got them. Thank you so much for watching. If you like this video make sure you hit the like button and let me know so I can make more videos like it in the future. And don't forget to subscribe to my channel to see more awesome stuff as it comes out. Thanks again for watching and I'll catch you later.