Easy DIY Hand Lettered Gift Tag

Hand Lettered Gift Tag

Friends, many of you probably saw this tag floating around on my social media this past week, as I entered it in a design contest. Huge thanks to all of you who voted for it, in the hopes that it would make the top five and be available in GAP stores. Unfortunately, it ended up a few votes shy of the prize, but the silver lining is that I get to go back to doing what I love most anyway…teaching YOU to make your own! It’s so much easier than you think, promise! You can do it! I’m going to walk you through step-by-step, and the best part is that you only need four supplies.

Are you ready?

Hand Lettered Gift Tag

You’ll need:
Two sheets of white card stock
Tag punch {or scissors, or blank pre-cut tag}
Pencil
Black marker or brush pen

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Step 1: Punch out your tag.
If you purchased pre-cut tags, you can skip this step. If you don’t have a tag punch, you can use an electronic cutting machine or good old scissors to cut one out.

Step 2: Write “wish” going on an upward diagonal.
A few things to note…first of all, place your tag on top of another piece of cardstock or scrap paper. Start your word on the scrap paper, move onto the tag, and finish off the “h” by letting the tail go onto the scrap paper as well. This will give the illusion that your word continues past the physical borders of the tag. Leave a little more space in between your letters than you normally would so that you can do the next step. Also, although you can write your letters any way you like, if you want them to be like mine, you’ll notice that I don’t use much slant in my script and that I form certain letters, like “S”, differently than in a standard script. Feel free to imitate exactly what you see here, or to put your own style into it!

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*Pro Tip: The pen I’m using is called the Tombow Fudenosuke {don’t ask me to pronounce that, you’re lucky I can spell it} Brush Pen, Soft Tip. You can use any kind of marker you like, but this is made specifically for calligraphy and lettering!*

Step 2: Go back and add a second line anywhere there is a down stroke.
Translation: when you wrote the word originally, anywhere your pen moved from the top of the paper to the bottom is a down stroke. Most often, this will be on the left side of a letter. For more details, see my Basic Hand Lettering post.

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Step 3: Color in the double lines to thicken the down strokes.
For a different effect entirely, you can fill in those spaces with a colored or metallic marker instead of your black one…just a fun variation to try!

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Step 4: Sketch a star outline in pencil.
Once again, we want the illusion of the star going off the tag, and since I’m terrible at drawing star outlines to begin with, I decided I needed to actually draw the whole thing. Start close to the edge of your tag and lightly pencil in a star that extends well onto your scrap paper.

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Step 5: Trace the star outline and erase your pencil marks.

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Step 6: Use your pencil to sketch a geometric pattern.
Mine was a series of triangles. I drew horizontal stripes across the star first, then added diagonal lines to form rows of triangles. If that seems like more work than you want to do, I bet this would look really cute with polka dots! Just sayin’…

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Step 7: Color in your design.
I filled in every other triangle black, leaving the rest white. Once again, you can use a different color if you like for a whole different look.

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All that’s left to do is attach a ribbon or some twine and tie it onto a package! I purposely left room in the bottom left corner to write a name…after all, a gift tag has one job, right?

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I love the way mine turned out and I really can’t wait to see what you create!

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You can do all kinds of variations with different words as well as shapes like trees, hearts, ornaments, and anything else you can think of. I’d be so excited to see your own creations, so I hope you’ll share them in the One Artsy Mama & Friends Facebook group or by email at dancers4life at gmail dot com!

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