How to Hand Letter on Acrylic Ornaments

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Use your hand lettering skills to create unique and meaningful gifts around the holidays, like these hand-lettered acrylic Christmas ornaments! I’m sharing some of my tips and tricks to hand letter on acrylic ornaments so that you can save yourself the time and headaches of trying to figure it out on your own!

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Best markers to use for Hand lettering on Acrylic Ornaments:

• Oil based Sharpie Pens–The most permanent, but will take a few coats to get it opaque
• Molotow Acrylic Pens–The most opaque, but may scratch off with effort
• DecoColor Paint Pens–Mixture of the two above, but available in an extra fine point and the gold is much less brassy than Molotow.
• Chalkola Acrylic Pens–they are available in extra fine point and normal size bullet tip. The extra fine points are great for very detailed work! Use code CHALKOLA10 to save 10% off your order.

You can use chalk markers or latex Sharpie pens, but keep in mind that these will wipe off quite easily. The Acrylics and Oil base pens are more permanent, but may still be able to scratch with effort. If you are gifting I recommend wrapping them in tissue paper to protect them. Some lettering experts also recommend Elmer’s Paint Pens but I have not personally used them.

Another option is to use permanent vinyl that is cut from your hand-lettered designs. Have a design you want to turn into an SVG to use with Cricut Maker or Silhouette Cameo? You may want to read this post on how to digitize hand lettering in Adobe Illustrator.

To keep hand lettering on acrylic simple, I suggest creating mockups first. To do this, take a sheet of paper and trace around one of the clear acrylic ornaments. Do this until you have the sheet filled up. Then create sketches of each design you plan to make. When you like the layout, go over it with ink to make it stand out more.

Since the acrylic Christmas ornaments are clear, you can set the ornament over a design to hand letter on the acrylic. Even leaving the back protector on the ornament in the photo below, you can still see through it.

Make sure you clean the surface of the acrylic with glass cleaner and let dry beforehand lettering on acrylic ornaments. Use your mockups to letter the design onto the acrylic. In the example below I used a Molotow Acrylic Paint marker. Use the faux calligraphy method to get a brush-lettered look if desired.

Once finished, peel the protective backing off, and clean it with glass cleaner. If desired add some brush strokes of acrylic paint to the backs of the ornaments to really make your hand lettering stand out!

Cut about 10″ of ribbon to add as a hanger for the ornaments. Loop it through the hole and tie a knot with the ends.

The gold pen used in these designs is the DecoColor Liquid Gold. It’s so juicy and I feel is more opaque than the Sharpie Oil-based gold.

Do you letter on acrylic? What are some of the tips and tricks you’ve learned along the way?

More lettering tutorials you may find helpful: