How long have you been lettering? Three weeks? Three years? It doesn’t matter when it comes to mistakes. We all make them. Of course when you are first learning how to master any form of lettering, there will perhaps be a few more than once you are well practised at it, but these flaws will still crop up. It was whilst recently trying to ‘fix’ a piece I had lovingly spent an hour lettering that I thought it may be helpful to share all my little ways of preventing and repairing common lettering mistakes or accidents.

Embrace the bounce!

Firstly, prevention is always better than cure, and the same goes for lettering. Besides taking the time to sketch everything first in pencil and ensuring your pen is in tip-top condition before putting it to the paper, you can also adopt the ‘bounce’ style to mask any issues with straight baselines you may regularly encounter. As I write naturally with my paper at a 45º angle, I have found that by creating bounced words, any angled baselines are unnoticeable and there is a lot of scope for creating white space to flourish in too!

To try your hand at the bounce technique - write your first letter in pencil where you would normally on a page. From here, the next letter will be slightly higher than the first, rather than sitting on the same line. Following on, the third letter will then go lower than the baseline to balance the word out. Continue alternating between raising and lowering your letters until you have completed your word.

Before going over this in pen, look at your connections between each letter. If you have any that are really stretched, erase the two letters and bring them both a little closer to the original base line.

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