Laying out a quote design by hand

In this tutorial, I’m going to show how I lay out a quote by hand. While you can do this on the computer easily for those well versed with Adobe, this is really meant for beginners. I also sometimes prefer to do this because it’s a more tactile experience.

To start off, these are the tools you’ll need.

• Grid paper
• calligraphy pen/ink
• X-acto knife or scissors, whichever you’re more comfortable using
• Glue
• pencil, erasers, ruler, tracing paper as needed

I found this really amazing tool that I use with my nieces for fun projects. It’s repositionable glue! It’s useful for when I don’t like where I put something, I can unseal and move again. It’s perfect for projects that are meant to move around a lot (not for final projects though).

Step 1

Write your quote in the hand you like. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just lay out the text in the size you want.

Step 2

It’s time to cut up the text! You’ll see that I use tracing paper on top of my grid. You don’t need to but I like to. You’ll also notice that I drew a vertical line down the center. This helps me orient the center of a page.

Step 3

Once I lay out the text, I make lines on a clean grid paper. This grid paper is now the layout I’ll use in the final design.

Step 4

This is where I add flourishes. You don’t need to add flourish. I know foundational is not meant to have flourish but I’ve broken a lot of those rules.

Voilà! Final piece!

Here, you’ll see that I used a lightbox to create the final piece. You can also do this by creating grids on the final paper (hard pencil is needed here so you can easily erase afterwards). You then approximate where each letter goes before laying your pen down.