Learn how to do striking, metallic gold lettering with a black outline and shadow in this step by step tutorial!

This post contains affiliate links. Learn more.

Supplies

For this hand lettering technique, you’ll need a metallic gold pen and a black, fine-tip pen.

Here are some metallic gold pens I recommend:

And here are black fineliner pens I recommend:

Metallic gold lettering with outline and shadow

Time needed: 20 minutes

Here’s how to do beautiful gold lettering with a black outline and shadow.

Write a word in metallic gold.
Use any gold pen you have, and make sure to leave a good amount of space between the letters.
Thicken the lines.
Go back over your writing and thicken up the lines. You can also make your writing look like calligraphy by adding thick downstrokes (learn how in this tutorial).
Outline the entire word with a black fine tip pen.
Using a black pen with a fine tip, carefully outline the entire word.
Add a shadow on one side of the word.
Finally, use the same black pen to add a bold shadow on one side of the letters.

If you aren’t sure where to put the shadow, head over to this tutorial where I show you how to do it step by step.

This lettering technique is pretty simple to do but the result looks amazing!

The contrast between the gold and black is really striking.

Try different pens and color combos! You can also do this with silver or any other metallic colors you have!

If you do the lettering on tracing paper, you’ll get a cool effect from the tracing paper wrinkling from the ink:

This gold and black lettering style is great for:

To take this a step further, you can also use a white pen to add highlights to the letters.

Using a white gel pen or a white paint pen, add small white marks on the letters on the opposite side of where the shadow is.

Adding highlights makes the lettering pop just a little bit more!

Check out these other fun lettering ideas!