Pressure practice for brush pens and Apple Pencil
Pressure control is the skill behind brush lettering: firm pressure on downstrokes for a thick line, a light touch on upstrokes for a thin line, and a smooth change between them. Practise it on simple drills before letters.
- Trace the stroke
- Trace the light stroke
- Write it on your own
Printable practice sheets
How this page reads pressure
With an Apple Pencil on an iPad in Safari, or another stylus that reports pressure, the line you draw gets wider as you press harder. When you check a drill, the feedback compares your pressure going down with your pressure going up and tells you if the contrast is there.
With a finger or mouse, the page cannot read pressure, so it draws thick going down and thin going up for you. Use those drills to learn the shapes.
A good routine
Five minutes of drills before lettering: a row of downstrokes, a row of upstrokes, then overturns, underturns and ovals. Keep the angle of the pen the same for the whole row.