In 2009 Dana Tanamachi made a chalk lettering installation in Brooklyn that led to a commission from Google. She was one of the people who brought back the chalkboard lettering you now see in cafés and markets. The principle is old and simple: light letters on a dark ground. In a notebook with black or blue pages that ground is already there, and what's left is knowing how to draw the strokes and what to draw them with.
The thick-stroke trick
All lettering with contrast follows one rule: strokes going down are thick and strokes going up are thin. With a brush pen you get it through pressure, heavier on the way down and almost none on the way up, holding the tip at about 45 degrees and taking your time. With an ordinary pen you cheat, and it looks just as good: write the word in cursive with a little extra space between letters, draw a second line beside every downstroke and fill the gap. It's called faux calligraphy, and it's the easiest way to start with a white gel pen.
Guidelines that erase
On white paper you draw guidelines in pencil. On dark paper graphite doesn't show, so you use a white pencil or a mechanical pencil with white lead, with a light touch. Mark the baseline and the height of the letters, write over them and erase only when the ink is completely dry. Erase sooner and the ink comes off with it.
What to draw with
White gel pens differ by line width, and the number on the barrel is misleading. On a Sakura Gelly Roll, the 05 leaves a 0.3 mm line, the 08 a 0.4 and the 10 a 0.5, because the number is the size of the ball, not the line. Sakura teaches combining them like this: write with one, let it dry, go over the downstrokes only with the boldest, and keep the finest for corners. The Uni-ball Signo Broad leaves a 0.6 mm line and is among the most opaque; people who use it say the trade-off is that it dries slowly.
For big letters there are paint markers like the Posca, which you shake with the cap on and press on scrap paper until the paint comes down. And if brush pens are your thing, watch out: the most common ones use water-based dye ink, which is translucent, and black dulls transparent colors. The ones that cover are pigment-based, like Tombow's white Fudenosuke, which the brand suggests applying in two or three layers, or metallic brush pens. In our tests, markers and brush pens behave well on our paper; what changes from one to the next is how much the ink covers. Every Bocetta comes with a white gel pen with a 0.8 mm tip to start with. There's more detail in which pens work on black and colored paper.
Keeping it from smudging
White gel ink sits on top of the paper and takes longer to dry than an ordinary pen, especially from bold tips. Three habits prevent almost every accident: a loose sheet under your hand, working so your hand never crosses what you just wrote, and waiting before you go over a stroke or turn the page. If something goes wrong on a black page, a matte black marker covers it.
Black or blue
Nero, with black pages, gives the strongest contrast, which is what fine strokes and small flourishes ask for. See Nero. Blu, with cobalt blue pages, has the look of an old blueprint that suits open compositions and big titles. See Blu. On both, the pages are blank and measure 17.6 × 24.5 cm, enough for a whole composition and not just one word.
Sources: Sakura's hand-lettering tutorial, Gelly Roll white line widths, Lettering Daily on faux calligraphy, Tombow on the white Fudenosuke and CreativePro on chalk lettering.