Goodies from my first brush-lettering learning experience!
Last month, I had the super good opportunity to learn the fundamentals of brush / hand lettering at a workshop in my city. Though its been some time since then, I felt it in me now to actually write about it, so this post is all about just that.
If you want to skip directly to the juicy part, please click scroll down and watch out for the BOLD TEXT.
I'm confused if I should refer to it as brush lettering or hand lettering, so I'm going to go with the former as that matches the pretty title of this post.
If you've noticed, brush lettering is becoming super popular these days if it already wasn't. Check Instagram for starters and you'll see just how many people are out there practising the beautiful script. Further, check YouTube or Skillshare and you'll see just how many people teach this for a living, and how many more are super interested in learning it!
My first brush with this form of calligraphy called brush lettering was when I stumbled upon Salt in Our Hair's travel blog. Their website mesmerized me with its simple yet rich features, the wonderfully bright and inspiring color tones and of course, all the brush / hand lettering that is everywhere in the site!
Since then, I've noticed it often around the internet, and have always wanted to learn the skill.
But while online-learning only can be many people's trusted choice of educating themselves for crafting, there are those like me out there, I think, who really need the practical education where a teacher is within reach of grasp to directly learn from. So you can guess how happy I was when I super surprisingly stumbled upon Sadhika Gupta's sponsored post on Instagram.
Image credits:
This is Sadhika Gupta's image from her Instagram account, @delhidoodler08
Lucky indeed that I saw it a mere 3-4 days away from the scheduled date!
IG sponsored posts FTW eh. Oh and the workshop included refreshments.
FOOD, YASS /(^_^)\
I paid within minutes of seeing the post and only then noticed that I had a dental extraction scheduled for just that morning. Yikes.
But I thought I'd wing it as the workshop was set for the late afternoon.
Well, the winging wasn't out of a foolish spur-of-the-moment decision, but I figured I'd be okay in a few hours given the experience of my dental extraction from yet another month before.
On D-day, I took my mum along as I thought it would be a wonderful change of scenario for her instead of having to be home by herself. Now please note that there's a little rant here:
I live in the outskirts of the city, and thus every time I set out to meet my friends or attend such workshops that happen well within the city, I have to travel a minimum of 1 - 1.5 hours before I make it to the venue. Today being the same, mum and I set out really early and despite the traffic jams, made it to the venue with ~20 minutes left until the scheduled time.
We waited for ~40 minutes when Ms. Sadhika finally turned up.
By then, I had already ordered brownies from the cafe we were at as I was super hungry and was a little upset at the delay; what with my Japanese-education and all that, I can't help but frown upon tardiness.
She apologised and said it was owing to the heavy traffic that she was late, which is indeed understandable. But I quite did not appreciate that she asked some of the participants to help out with assembling the kits for everyone and stapling the hand-lettered nameplates she'd made.
I was glad to help out as it was already ~25 minutes past the scheduled time, but I really did think and wished that she'd have assembled the kits and finished with the stapling before reaching the venue.
Crude as this might sound, I found that bit unprofessional; if one had already planned to hold multiple workshops on the same day, then it is safe to assume one had prepared for it thoroughly, yes? Nope, I don't mean the traffic part here as that can always be unpredictable.
Rant over.
BOLD TEXT here for the bold scroller.
Sadhika Gupta is wonderful at brush-lettering and it takes only one session with her to understand that.
She got us started off with working on the basic strokes after a detailed explanation and demonstration, and we were all at it for a good deal. After that, we moved on to the lower-case characters. It was wonderful to find out how a good grip on the fundamentals help a lot with everything else.
Sadhika walked around the tables, paying attention to everybody's strokes and helped us with corrections and compliments about the way we'd poised our brush pens, how we had to go light or hard with the force here and there etc.
Sadhika then taught us how to use a clear plastic sheet to mix different colors to create a beautiful mixed-color background on cardboard. This would serve as the gorgeous backdrops to brush-letter against. While the backdrops were wet and left to dry, we had refreshments -- delicious, solid and scrumptious food from the cafe -- and we practised even more.
As a lot of time had already passed by then, and as it looked like there might not be enough time to slowly practise everything that was in her bundle of learning-material, she began explaining with demonstrations of all the content in it. All the participants huddled around her chair and stood on toes to catch everything she said. Wherever we had doubts, Sadhika would stop to explain it as thoroughly as she could before moving on.
After that, we'd to finish with all the lower-case letters, start a bit of the upper-case if we could, then work on mixing colors in the hand-lettered script -- she taught us 2 ways and we tried both. As the backdrops from earlier had dried up, we all tried hand-lettering words of our choice to wrap up with.
There was a lot of enthusiasm at this as we got to try out everything we'd just learnt.
You get that, right? The thrill a new learner gets when applying what they've just learnt?
I absolutely love it!
I chose "Have Courage and Be Kind" from the Cinderella live action movie. Aside the fact that I'm a Disney fanatic, I think there's a lot of truth in this simple sentence and lookie hoo! The participant seated right beside me also lettered the very same words! :D Needless to say, we were both super ecstatic to discover that likeness.
Image credits:
This is Sadhika Gupta's image from her Instagram account, @delhidoodler08
We wrapped it all up with a group picture at the end. There were some friendships formed and after exchange of contacts and taking selfies together, we all went our way home.
My mum loved it and I was very happy that we could go out on a "date" like this. Of course, I was thankful and happy about the "date" with Sadhika, too!