In a day and age where most scrapbookers print their journalling from their computer, I still do handwritten journalling. Most of it is due to the fact that I don’t have a printer, but the fact is that I like my handwritten journalling. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s personal.
I will admit that my handwriting (or printing to be more precise) has become better since I took up scrapbooking, mostly due to the fact that I wanted it to look nice in my books. I experimented with a few styles until I found a way to write with both ease and speed without comprimising how it looked.
There are some scrapbookers with phenominal writing. Ali Edwards and Heidi Swapp immediately spring to mind. I love their writting. I want to write like them. I want to write like Ali Edwards for my journalling, and I want to write like Heidi Swap for titles. I’m still working on it.
And so comes the topic of today: How to improve your writting. The basic premise is simple. If you want to have nice handwriting, you need to practice. The more you practice, the better you become. There are a few articles online on how to improve your handwriting, I especially like the articles on eHow.com and Paperpenalia.com.
When I practice my writing I make sure I am comfortable and relaxed, put an example font in front of me, and then practice. I’m currently working on Heidi Swapp’s style. My end goal isn’t necessarily to completely immitate her writing style, but rather to get comfortable with it and expand it to a similar writing style that will work for me. We are still working on this. We are now working a little harder on this since we’ve almost completely run out of my treasured Heidi rub-ons. ;)
Speaking of Heidi Swapp, her new book Love your Handwriting is proving to be quite popular. This book doesn’t tell you how to write like Heidi, but rather how to improve your existing writing. She goes into the basics of pens, pencils, height and spacing to build your handwriting into something you love. Of course, I’m still waiting to get my hands on this book.
Now once you’ve improved your handwriting into something you love, you can hand journal endlessly on your layouts. Or you could make you wonderful new writing style into a font. If you don’t own software to do this (and most people don’t), then you can have someone else do it for you. Places like Fontifier take your handwriting and turn it into a font. You get to preview the font online, and if you like it, you can buy it for the mere $9USD.
If all this seems like a little too much work, then why not use other people’s handwriting. Fontgarden has a lovely collection of other people’s handwriting fonts which are downloadable for free. DaFont also has a wide variety of fonts in this style. An no, not all of them are as ‘grungy’ as the first few.
If you are willing to part with a few dollars US, Two peas in a bucket also has a few collections of handwriting fonts including 2peas fonts and the Autumn Leaves collection of hadwritten fonts.
In the end I hope that with all the options available, from handwriting to computer fonts, and the release with books like Heidi Swapp’s Love your Handwriting, it encourages people to journal more, or at least include some journalling on their layouts. After all, aren’t the stories behind those photographs you are scrapping just as important as the photos themselves? And maybe, just maybe, you might try some hand journalling on those layouts. I’m sure your family will delight in seeing your writing in the years to come, whether or not you love your own handwriting.