Hand-Lettering: An Interactive Guide to the Art of Drawing Letters

Letters are just shapes. Start drawing.

Hand-Lettering: An Interactive Guide to the Art of Drawing Letters is an approachable introduction to turning everyday handwriting into something a little more deliberate, decorative, and entirely your own.

Learn five major hand-lettering styles, then experiment with mixing styles, adding embellishments, shading, illustration, and other details. Step-by-step tutorials introduce the techniques, while traceable sections and practice pages give you somewhere to actually try them—which is considerably more useful than staring at somebody else's beautiful lettering and wondering how on earth they did that.

Full-color examples provide plenty of inspiration without requiring you to arrive with particularly impressive handwriting.

Use what you learn for cards, journals, signs, labels, gifts, or simply an afternoon spent discovering that drawing letters is surprisingly satisfying.

Details

Focus: Hand lettering and decorative lettering

Skill level: Beginner-friendly

Includes: Five major lettering styles, step-by-step techniques, projects, traceable exercises, and practice pages

Techniques: Letter forms, embellishment, shading, illustration, and combining lettering styles

Pages: 160

Illustrations: Full-color illustrations and photographs throughout

Binding: Hardcover

Size: 7.5 × 9.5 inches

Great for: Hand lettering, creative journaling, cards, signs, handmade gifts, and learning a new art form

Why We Love It

You don't need beautiful handwriting.

That's one of our favorite things about hand lettering: you're not really writing the letters so much as drawing them.

This book makes that distinction wonderfully approachable. Trace something. Copy a shape. Try it again. Make one line thicker. Add a shadow. Discover that your third attempt looks much better than your first.

And if one particular G becomes inexplicably important to you, well, apparently that's just who you are now.

About Peter Pauper Press

Peter Pauper Press is an independent, family-owned publisher that has been creating books and paper goods since 1928. What began with finely made books has grown to include journals, stationery, art materials, creative kits, and thoughtfully designed tools for writing and making.

Their creative books and Studio Series supplies make it particularly easy to start somewhere—whether you're learning a technique for the first time or simply looking for an excuse to make something.