The Art of Brush Lettering by Kelly Klapstein

The Art of Brush Lettering by Kelly Klapstein ISBN-13: 9781631593550 Paperback: 160 pages Publisher: Quarry Books Released: Nov. 28, 2017

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description from Goodreads:
Popular Instagram brush lettering artist Kelly Klapstein takes a simple, serene approach to teaching the art of creating beautiful letterforms with easy to use and richly colored brush pens. Kelly begins by guiding you through the tools you’ll be using, and the best ways to position pen, hand, and paper.

Kelly demonstrates a range of basic strokes along with drill sheets for practice and improvement. In addition to providing detailed instructions and tracing guides for both lowercase and uppercase alphabets, Kelly gives tutorials on freestyle lettering, faux calligraphy, and special effects. Also included are lowercase and uppercase A to Z exemplars for both large and small brush pens. Drill sheets, tracing guides, worksheets, and exemplars are included at the back of the book.


My Review:
The Art of Brush Lettering is an art book about using brush markers to create Copperplate-type lettering. The author described how she enjoys doing lettering as a meditative exercise. She then described in detail your choices in tools (markers and paper), how to store your markers, how to hold the marker, how to practice the downward and upward pressure used in brush lettering, and finally how to do every stroke of every letter (lower and upper case) in the main style of lettering that she likes. She even talked about proper posture and stretching your hand and neck muscles. She also explained some additional lettering styles (modern, bounce, etc.) and effects (shadows, highlights, patterns, etc.). Finally, she had some worksheets for you to practice on.

While the author provided detailed instruction for beginners on using markers for lettering, she focused on only one style. Yes, she described how other styles work, but her focus was on the reader perfecting one main style. If you simply want to learn brush marker calligraphy and like her chosen font (or don't care what font you start with), then this should help you do it.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt: Read an excerpt using Google Preview.