How it works
Type up to 10 letters and see how to draw bubble letters step by step: your word drawn four times, pencilled, outlined, rubbed out and coloured. It opens on the word Bubble. Bubble letters start as thin handwriting, so 3 of the 6 fonts are handwriting.
Read the full guide
Bubble letters: how to draw them in 4 steps
Step 1 is your word in grey, like light pencil. Step 2 adds a black outline, one distance from the pencil line all the way round. Printed, a word of 4 to 10 letters has capitals about 19 mm tall with the outline 2.5 mm out, an eighth of that height. Step 3 rubs the pencil out and step 4 adds colour. Its shine mark is left to you: a short white dash near the top left of every letter.
How to bubble letters that have holes
A hole narrower than twice that distance closes. In Patrick Hand the eye of e becomes a black slit and the triangle of A a black wedge, while O and D stay white. Draw them that way by hand. Next font fattens the pencil letter: DynaPuff writes an l about five times as wide as Indie Flower, and of its letters only capital O stays open.
Tips
- The 15 practice words show how to draw bubble letters, easy shapes first: HI, LIFT and TILE are straight bars, the easy bubble letters to draw. Curves (COOL), holes (ROAD), diagonals (WAVY) and small letters (happy) follow.
- Most of a bubble letters drawing is spacing. Space the pencil word wider than usual: every letter grows on both sides, and where neighbours touch the sheet merges them.
- Look does nothing on this sheet, which always draws the Bubble outline. For bubble letters ideas past that, try shadows or graffiti.
Questions and answers
What are bubble letters?
Letters drawn as fat, rounded outlines, as if every stroke had been inflated. Wikipedia's glossary of graffiti describes their nearest relative, the throw-up, as a one-colour outline with one layer of fill, often built from easy-to-paint bubble shapes.
How do you draw bubble letters by hand?
Write the word lightly, draw round every stroke at one steady distance, and curve each corner and stroke end. Rub out the pencil and ink the outline. Straight strokes make bubble letters easy to draw. One more rule for drawing bubble letters: narrow holes close.
How to do bubble letters bigger than the sheet?
Treat the strip as a bubble letters tutorial and scale up by hand. Rule two pencil lines for the letter height, write the word between them and keep the outline an eighth of that height away. Each stroke is then a little wider than a quarter of the height.