Transcripts
1. Welcome!: Hi. I'm Andy. I'm an artist whilst juggling a 9-5 job. My interests include calligraphy, illustration, watercolors, and engraving. My calligraphy journey started a few years back while struggling with mental health. During that time, I heard about bullet journaling and felt that adding that little bit of art to my journal brought me some joy. I used to spend hours looking at the beautiful things others created and wishing I could create it too. At the time, I resorted to buying stickers for printing out things I thought were pretty, but I had never really had the courage to start learning the skill myself. In 2018, I started learning the basic calligraphy strokes and I haven't stopped since. I started straight away with learning proper calligraphy, but it took a lot of practice and the learning curve was big. There are so many specific tools depending on the style you like most, and you need to learn how to use each one. Looking back, I wish I had learned this technique we'll be covering today, as I think it would have allowed me to create a calligraphy effect earlier while still learning and practicing proper calligraphy. This is also the technique that many artists use to recreate calligraphy when they don't have the proper skills or required tools. In this class, I will teach you what I wished I had learned when I was a total beginner. You will learn to recreate the calligraphy look without having to invest in learning and practicing the proper way of doing calligraphy. Let's get started.
2. What you'll take home with you: Hi, glad you joined the class. Here, you will learn to create a beautiful alphabet with any pencil or pen. In the end, you will create a piece with the word or short quote using the full calligraphy technique. To do so, we will go over some basics to understand the underlying ideas behind calligraphy, which you will apply in the full calligraphy technique. We will start with looking at what is calligraphy and I can tell you right now, it's not the same thing as having pretty handwriting. For real this is my handwriting and this is my calligraphy. No one would ever tell it's made by the same person. Next, I will explain the differences between calligraphy, lettering and full calligraphy. Indeed, unlike what you may have heard, they aren't the same thing and I will tell you why. Following this, we will pick our tool and our paper, and we will go over the basic strokes and why these are important. Next, we will put the basic strokes together and learn a mono-line alphabet. Finally, we will go over the full calligraphy technique and move on to the final project. I'm so excited, in the next class, we're going to talk materials.
3. Materials : This may be one of the simplest videos on materials you will ever see here. I mean it. For this class, all you will need is some paper and any pencil or pen that's it. Any paper will do just fine but I will be using the rodeo dotted pad, because it's where I enjoy practicing my calligraphy thanks to the smoothness of the paper and the fact that it takes ink so well without bleeding. As for pens, I will be using Tombow dual pens in different colors to make it easier to follow along. But any marker, pen or pencil will do. If you use a pencil, choose an HB or a 2B pencil, as any harder than HB will make dents onto the paper and we don't need that. In fact, we want to work with little pressure, so soft pencil or a marker will do just fine. Just be sure to use a paper that works well with your choice of tool. Now that you've gathered the necessary materials, let's move on to the next lesson, where we will look into what calligraphy is all about, and why it is different from lettering and folk calligraphy.
4. Calligraphy vs Lettering : Now that we're all set with our materials, let's look into what exactly is calligraphy. In short, calligraphy is the art of writing letters, and it is a stroke-based technique. To do this, you combine strokes while using a specific tool to create different styles and alphabets. There is Italic, Copperplate, until Round Hand, Blackletter just to name a few. These alphabets were used in a specific time and historic context. Of course, I will not bore you with the specifics of each calligraphic style, but it is important for you to know that they exist. The important thing for you to remember is that calligraphy is used to communicate a message, and you may ask, but handwriting is also a form of communicating and writing. How is it so different from calligraphy? This is a very relevant question and the difference lies in the way you write it, when you're taking notes, how do your letters look overall? Are you focused on getting the information on paper and doing it quickly or making it all look pretty and neat. If you're anything like me, your letters are all over the place and the goal is more related to what you're writing than the actual look of it. In calligraphy, the form, the building blocks, also known as strokes, the spacing, the slant are all important factors that you must take into consideration when writing. That is why in the end, you're more focused on the strokes that make up each letter while doing it. That is also why so many times I make typos, I'm more focused on getting the stroke right that it's easy to lose track of the next letter. In calligraphy you want it all to come together in a beautiful and cohesive way and not just jotting down some information to get back to it later. Think of it this way, the word is the overall painting and the strokes comprise the building blocks that will create the overall piece. For this reason, it is important to pay attention to the strokes, slants, spacing when creating calligraphy, and most importantly, taking your time to get all those variables right. The process is part of the experience so take your time when doing calligraphy. How is lettering any different? Lettering is a whole different story. You can create a lettering piece that looks exactly like calligraphy and still one is called calligraphy and another lettering. Why? Because of the technique and tools you use. Lettering is the art of drawing letters, calligraphy is the art of writing letters and strokes. In lettering you start with a rough sketch, you build on it, and then you go over an ink for your finished piece. In other words, in lettering, you mimic the look of what a calligraphy tool can create with a group of strokes, makes sense? What about faux or false calligraphy? Faux calligraphy is a technique used by many artists when they want to replicate the look of calligraphy, but don't have the necessary tool or skill to do it directly. In other words, this is the hack artists use to recreate a calligraphy style without the need for a million hours of practice using a new tool. In short, for calligraphy is a mix between lettering and calligraphy. The technique I will teach you today uses a bit of both to recreate the faux calligraphy effect. Now that you know the difference between lettering calligraphy and faux calligraphy, let's go over the basic strokes for the next lesson.
5. Guidelines Side Note: Just a little side note before we start going into the different strokes. We need to know a little bit of the concepts that I will be using and the words that I'll be using in order to explain how to do the strokes and how to do the letters. This is a basic grid line for calligraphy, and in this case, what you will see is that you've got an X drawn here and then you've got 1, 2, 3, 4 lines. The bottom of the X is called the baseline, and the top is called the X-height, so all the main letters and all the body of the letters will be within these two lines, such as the X is. Then you've got the ascending line and the descending line. These are the two lines in which your letters, the ones that go above the X-height will go to, and then you've got the descending ones, for example, ascending for an H, and descending for a J. These are some important concepts for you to know so that you can understand better when I start explaining all the different strokes and how the letters are composed. You will have this template available to you in the resources tab for the Skillshare's class, as well as the image that will show you in a little bit more detail what I just explained here.
6. Basic Strokes: [MUSIC] As mentioned in the previous lesson, each letter in calligraphy is created with a group of strokes. There are seven basic strokes that are used to create almost every letter of the lower-case alphabet. You can find a template with these basic strokes for reference at the class resources tab which is only visible when you're accessing through the desktop website. Let's go over the basic strokes. What are they? I will do each one with a different color so that it's easier for you to see them. We've got the upstroke which is basically going from the bottom of your line all the way up. It does curve a little bit and you want it to go all the way. You want them all to be very parallel to each other. Basically what it gives you is the entry and the exit strokes for each letter. Moving on to the next stroke. The under turn is basically a U-shape. Go down, curve and then up, and then go down again, curve and up. What you want to notice is that these two strokes or these two lines are always parallel to each other. This is the underturn and now the overturn is basically the reverse of the underturn. Going up, turn down. These are the things that you need to take into consideration keeping always in parallel lines. You see angle is always the same between all of them and the same here in the overturn. You want them to curve in the line in the baseline in case of the underturn and you want them to curve in the x-height in case of the overturn. These are basically the things that you should consider when you're doing the underturn and the overturn. The next stroke is called a compound curve which is basically a mix of these two. You start with the overturn and you go up, curve, down, curve, up. Basically it's a mix of these two. Let's do it again. The things that you should take into consideration again is making all of these lines parallel to each other and also making them the same distance or occupying the same space in terms of ovals as the ones before. You want them all to be consistent because if the strokes are inconsistent the letters won't look consistent either. The next stroke is the ascending loop. In this case what you want to do is you want to go, if this is the baseline of your letter, this is the x-height and this is the height of the letters that go over for example an H or a B. This will be the stroke to create the H or the B. You start here on the top, you go up, turn, and then down all the way to the baseline. Let's do it again. Basically this is the ascending loop, again, taking into consideration the slant. The next one is the descending loop, so for Gs for example. You start again on the x-height, going down to the descending loop and then finishing on the baseline. Let's do it again. These are all the things that you should take into consideration in terms of the ascending and descending loops. Here you have them all parallel to each other. In terms of the ascending loops, you want them to start at the x-height and in terms of the baseline you want them to start on the x-height and then finish on the baseline. Finally, we will look at a final stroke which is the ovals. In this case the ovals are basically just, they're not circles, they have to be ovals. You want to start in the middle for example, then work your way up, down, and then over again. Be sure to take into consideration that they do touch each other here. You do it like this. Start in the middle and then go all the way down and practice meeting the pen where it was. Otherwise you can always start wherever it's easier for you. But nevertheless, if you go on to pursuing calligraphy it will be easier if you start practicing the right way. Here as you can see my ovals are not very good. I should be practicing the more. We can do them a little bit more. I'll do a few more just for you to see. Basically things that you should consider in the ovals, you want them all to have more or less the same shapes. They all need to be ovals. You want them all to be within the same axis. In this case, this one is not wide enough, it's very short. It should have gone a little bit more. But overall, these are your basic strokes. With these strokes you will be able to do all the lowercase letters. In this case, let's take for example an H. You would start with an upstroke, then you would want an ascending loop and finally you would finish it with a compound curve and that would be an H. If you wanted for example an A you would go with an upstroke again, then an oval, and then an underturn. That's your A. Practice your strokes a little bit longer until you're very comfortable with doing them because this will be the basis for your lowercase letters. Once you're comfortable with them, I'll see you in the next lesson where we will see how they turn into letters, all of the letters. See you there.
7. Letters i t u v w n m: Welcome back. In our last lesson, we went over the basic strokes, so just a little reminder of them. We've got the upstroke, overturn, the underturn, the compound curve, the ascending loop, the descending loop, and the ovum. These will be our basic strokes and the basis for our lower-case alphabet. Let's look into how to create different letters. We will design, or we will start looking into the letters in five different groups according to the type of strokes that they are composed of. As I said before, all letters will sit on the baseline. For the first group, I'm just going to draw here. We will look into the letters i. The letter I starts with an upstroke and then it has a downstroke. I just realized that I didn't use the colors here in my basic stroke, so I can't remember which color is which. Let's just go. I'll just do it like this. The i starts with an upstroke, and then it needs a underturn, and this will basically be your i. I'm just going to use a gray color to show you other strokes that might not be within these basic strokes. So you've got the upstroke, the underturn, and then you're going to need a little dot to make the i, and this will give you the i. Let's do it again, and I'm going to do it all in just one color. Things to take into consideration with the i, is that you want all of these, again, to be parallel to each other, and you always want to leave the same amount of space between all the different strokes. Another thing to take into consideration is the dot of the i to be more or less in the middle of the x-height and the ascending line. The second letter of this group is a t, which is very similar to an i. The t starts with the upstroke, then it needs a underturn, but this underturn will start a line with the dots from the i, going down, and then up, and then it stops right on the x-height. Then you're going to add a stroke like this. Let's do it again. Let's do it all in black. Things to take into consideration is again, the slant. You always want these two to be parallel, and again, the ovals. Next letter of the group is a u. The u starts just like the other ones do, in this case, with an upstroke, and then you will do two underturns, and this will be your u. Let's do it again. Let's do it all in black, and that's your u. Let's look into some details of this u. Here you can see that these two u's are a little less slanted, this one the same, but they are all parallel to each other. In this case, I change the slant here, and so they're still all parallel to each other. Again, the space between the underturns should be always the same. Basically that's your u. Then we will look into a v. A v is very similar to the u, but it uses just one more stroke than the u. In this case, you go upstroke, underturn, and then you add a sideway comma, starting from the end of the upstroke, but if you want to say it in a different way, you can call it a tiny underturn. Let's do it again. Carrying on to some more letters, I'm just going to do a little bit more of grid lines so that we have some more grid lines here available to us. Our next letter in this group is going to be a w. Basically a w is a mix between the u and the v. It starts with an upstroke, underturn, underturn, and then a small underturn. Let's do it again. There are only two more letters in this group, which are the m and the n. We will start with the easiest one, which is the n. You have two options to draw the n. You can either draw it with an overturn and then a compound curve, and that's your n. Let's do it again. Another possibility is if you do an upstroke, a downstroke, which is something that I didn't tell you about, but it's basically you go up and then you come down, and then you can do the compound curve. The m is going to be very similar to this, which basically is just going to have two overturns. So one overturn, two overturns, and then a compound curve. One more time. Let's do all these letters one more time all in black just so that she can see how they look. We can also start trying to put them together and connecting them, although with these letters I'm not sure if we can do, actually we can do a word. This is your x-height. The word will be, for example, tim. You do the upstroke for the t, underturn, then upstroke for the t, and then cross it. Then if you want to do the i, you can do, this part will already be the upstroke of the i, so all you'll have to do is an underturn and then you already have your i. Then if you want to do the m for tim, this is already your upstroke, and we can use this version for the m, like we use for the n, so this will be the upstroke, downstroke, and then overturn, and compound curve. This will give us tim. Let's do it again. Let's do a little bit more of these letters. Let's do one of each again. An i, a t, a u, a v, w, n, and the m. Before we finish this lesson, just a few pointers to take into consideration, or as a reminder. Try and make all your strokes within the same slant and parallel to each other. As you can see here, they are all more or less parallel to each other and equally spaced out. That is also very important here. For the compound curve to look better, remember to try and make them parallel to each other as much as possible. In this case, it doesn't look so well, but here you can see that these are all very parallel to each other. The dot for the i goes in the middle of the line as does the cross for the t, and then all the remaining ones are all within the baseline and the x-height. Again, make sure that the spacing between all the letters, or all the strokes is the same. This negative space, make sure that it's all similar to each other. In this case, this one should be a little bit smaller, and this one is okay. That's it. Let's look into the second group of letters in the next lesson, which is basically the h, the y, the j, and the l. See you there. Bye.
8. Letters h y j l : In the previous lesson, we looked into Group 1, which was comprised of the letters i, t, u, v, w, m, and n. To do the next group of letters, in this case we will have Group 2. This group will have the letters h, y, j, and l. Let's see how these letters are made up. The h, you already know, because we did it in our strokes lesson. But let's do it again. Basically, let's see. The h has an upstroke, an ascending loop, and then a compound curve. One more time. Things to take into consideration as always, making sure that all the strokes are parallel to each other, that they're ovals all in the same size. Basically, that's it. Moving on to the next letter, which is y. Y can start in two ways like we did Ms and the Ns. The y can start with an upstroke, then an underturn. Finally, a down stroke and an exit stroke, which is, again, an abstract. The y again, this is one possibility. The second possibility is instead of starting with an upstroke, you can start with a compound curve, straight to the descending loop, and then upstroke again. Let's do it again. Let's see these two versions of the y on black. Let's move on to the next letter which is very similar to the y, which is the j. We will have an upstroke, then directly to a descending loop, and then another upstroke. Don't forget to put the dot like we did for the i. One more time. Things to take into consideration is that, this negative space should be the same, as well as the ovals that make up all these different strokes or that make up this letter. Again, making sure that they are all parallel to each other. Finally, the l, we've got upstroke ascending loop. Then what we do is the loop turns into an under stroke. Let's do it again. Let's practice this group again, all in black. This is it for the Group 2, continue on practicing these letters as well as the letters from Group A, and I will see you in the next lesson where we will look at the third group of letters. See you there.
9. Letters a d o c e : Okay, so welcome back to our third group of letters. From our previous lessons, we looked into the basic strokes, the letters from Group 1, then we looked onto the letters of Group 2, and now it's time to go and look into the letters of Group 3. In this group of letters, we will look into the oval shapes. We've got the letter a, the letter d, letter o, the letter c, and the letter e, which actually it's funny because in Portuguese, this makes a word that means sweeten, so let's make this group very sweet. The letter a starts with the upstroke, then an oval, and then an underturn, and that will make our letter a, in black. Things to take into consideration, the oval here and here should be the same size, as well as the slant of the lines and of the strokes. Moving on to letter d. It's very similar to letter a, but the difference is that the underturn will be longer, elongated, like in the t. We've got upstroke, oval, and a longer underturn as such. Let's do it again, all in black. You should take into consideration the same things. These must all be within the same slant, and the spacing in terms of ovals should also be the same. The next letter is a lot easier. In this case, it's the o. You do the upstroke, then you do the oval, and you finish with one of those underturn small ones like you did for the v's and w's. Again, in black. A little tip that you can take into consideration is, I don't know if you noticed, but I started my o here in the middle of the lines between the baseline and the x-height, and this is because in calligraphy, it will come out a lot handier, so that you can be sure that the lines touch each other. If you do a little mistake or if it doesn't go a 100 percent, all the same, you can disguise a little bit with the next stroke, so you do the upturn, oval, and if it doesn't look nice here, you can always do the next stroke so that it looks a little bit better. Another thing that you should take into consideration regarding these strokes, you don't want the downstroke here to go over the oval. For example, this is what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to do like this, because as you can see, this made a very wonky d. What I want you to do is give it space, and just barely touch it in the oval, like that. It's almost not touching. Moving on to the next letter, we've got letter c, which is basically just parts of ovals. You've got the upstroke, and then you start doing the oval in the middle, down, and instead of going and finishing the oval, you're going to go forward. This will give you letter c. Let's do it again. This is going to be to your letter c, and your letter e is going to be very similar, so you go upstroke, and then you can start as we did the c, so you can do c, and then you can close here, or if you prefer, you can already start [inaudible] and go up, turn, and then do like the c. One more time. Let's go over all the letters again from this group. If you want to connect all of this, you can go upstroke for the a, oval, underturn. This underturn will already be the upstroke of the d, so you go towards the o, so the oval, another underturn, but in this time, it goes a little bit higher. This part will already be the entry stroke for the o, so let's go directly to the oval of the o, and then we're going to start doing the c, and then I'm going to start the e, with the tiny loop as well. These exit and entry strokes are very important, so that you can actually do the the connections easier. Let's do it again. I went very slowly so that to be sure that I was doing the things correctly. I took into consideration that I wanted all my strokes to be within the same slant, the spacing, the ovals, are all more or less the same size, and all of these features will make it look a lot nicer in terms of a very consistent writing. If you compare this one here with this one, you can see that the slant here is completely wrong. What you want to do is you want to concentrate on each stroke that you're drawing in order to make it look a lot better from one to the other. This wraps up Group 3. In the next lesson, we will look into the Group 4 of letters, so there's only two more groups to go, and I'll see you there.
10. Letters g q b p : Welcome back to the next lesson. In the previous lessons, we looked at the Group 1, Group 2, Group 3 of letters. Now we are going to look into the Group 4 of letters, which basically is the ovals and ascending or descending loops group. In this group, we will, or in this lesson, we will look at the g, the q, the b, and the p. Going straight to letter g, we start with an upstroke, followed by an oval, and the descending loop, and finally, another upstroke. Let's do it again. The q is very similar. We do an upstroke, an oval, and now the important thing about the q is that the descending loop, instead of looping towards the left, we are going to make it loop towards the right. The descending loop, like so, and finally, another upstroke. Let's do it again. Then let's look at the b. The b, upstroke, ascending loop, oval, and another upstroke. Let's do it again. The oval here, for the b and for the p, I normally start on different spots. I start where the ascending loops finished, and I go the other way round, like so. If you want to practice the reverse ovals, you start from the x-height, go around, and you finish where you were. Let's do it again for the b, and finally for the p. We have an upstroke, we've got a descending loop, a reverse oval, and another upstroke. Let's do it again. If we look at all the letters again but in black. That's it for our Group 4, for the letters g, q, b and p. I'll see you in the next lesson when we look at groups, the fifth and final group of letters, which are the weird ones. I'll see you there. Bye.
11. Letters f k r s x z : Welcome back. We are now going into our final group of letters, group 5 with all the weird letters. Just to go over the last lessons, we've already looked through four groups of letters, and we are now just going on to the final group of letters, which is the weird ones. We are going to start with the f. The f is a letter. It's basically the biggest letter that you're going to do in lowercase letters. Let's just go straight to it. We've got the upstroke. Then you're going to have a mix of an ascending loop. Then it's going to turn into a reverse descending loop. I'm going to show you how that looks. Ascending loop around all the way down descending loop, or reverse the ascending loop. Then an upstroke again. If you want to practice this strange shape, let's do it again. It starts on the x-height, goes all the way to the ascending line, all the way down to the descending line, and then looping again and finishing on the baseline. Let's do the f. Your k is basically going to be an upstroke an ascending loop. Then you've got a strange stroke, which is basically starting from the baseline going forward. You're going to do a tiny little loop. Then you're going to do a tiny underturn starting from where the loop finished and then going up. Let's do it again, upstroke, ascending loop. Starting from the baseline going forward and finishing more or less in the middle of the baseline with the x-height, and then doing a underturn, that goes forward like the c and the e. If you want to see it altogether, if this little stroke is not very easy for you to do, there is an alternative. You can do again the upstroke ascending loop. Then instead of making it loop, you can just finish there. You can start again on the baseline, and you can just do a little squiggle like that. Then you start again the underturn where you would in the other ones. Here in the middle, down and then forward. One more time, upstroke, ascending loop. Start from the baseline going to the x-height, do a little dot, and then from the middle underturn, going forward. In just one color. That's your f and your k. Now let's look at the r. The r starts with an upstroke. You can actually do it a little bit longer over the x-height. Then you have another strange stroke, which is basically, not even sure how I can explain it. I have small underturn, and then a normal underturn. Let's do it again. Upstroke, a smaller underturn. One thing that I didn't do correctly here is that you want the smaller underturn to finish below the x-height and then underturn. Again in just one color. An alternative is you can do a loop, so you can go up and loop. Then you do the same, the rest the same, like that and underturn. So in just one color. The s is very similar to the r. It goes upturn above the x-height. Then you do an s shape and finish it with a dot and then an upstroke. I'm going to do this S-shape again. You start right above the x-height, you come down and curve and you finish it with a dot. Now let's put it all together with the upstrokes. This is your s, the x. Do you remember the compound curve, the one that goes like this? All of the lines are within the same slant. In this case, the slant that you want to do is you want the middle one to be a little bit different. You're going to do a compound curve going up and then changing the slant and then going up again. This is the first part of your x. These two are parallel and this one is not. This is the first part of the x. Let's do it again up, forward, up. The second stroke for this one is an s curve going around, so start, go through the middle and back again. Just to show you how it goes, it's like a space dot s. Let's do it again. This is your x. I'm going to do it all in one color. Finally, moving on to the last letter, which is basically the zee or the z. It starts with a different stroke as well. It's sort of an overturn, but then that it turns like the s. We go up and then we turn. This is the beginning of the z. Then from the dot you do a descending loop that already starts in the baseline. Let's do it again. We finish with an upstroke. All in the same color. That's a wrap. This is the rest of our group 5. We finished all our letters of the alphabet. Practice these until you are confident with them and comfortable doing them so that we can start putting them all together, and then going forward to the four calligraphy technique. See you there. Bye.
12. Writing Words: Welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, we are going to start putting all the letters together in order to form words. We've already done a little bit of this during the group, we did it for team and for the group 3 of the ovals. But we are going to do this a little bit further with more words. Now I'm switching on just to a regular black pen. As you already know how to do all the letters and we've practiced them all together. I'm just going to write with a regular Tombow dual pen. We're going to start writing a few words. Let's start with, for example, calligraphy. Upstroke, semi-oval, going forward, another oval, another turn, ascending loop, that goes forward, ascending loop that goes forward, another turn, a little hole, descending loop, upstroke, another turn, a little hole, another turn, descending loop, inverse oval, upstroke, descending loop, compound curve, another turn, descending loop, and upstroke. That's how to write calligraphy with your new monoline alphabet. Let's look into a different word. For example, you can do this. Let's do about four tiny words. I'm going to do the different y, the one that starts with the compound curve. Compound curve, descending loop, upstroke, oval, tiny underturn, regular underturn, another one, and that's you. Then can. We can start with upstroke, semi-oval, going forward, oval, underturn, then we're going to do the version of the n that goes with the down stroke, compound curve, you can, then do. Upstroke, oval, long underturn, oval, tiny underturn. You can do. Then upstroke, long underturn, cross, then ascending loop, compound curve, descending loop, then the squiggle for the s, the dot, then the upstroke, dot for the I. You can do this. As you can see, all you need to do is practice because practice makes progress and eventually perfect. What I want you to do is practice a lot of words. You can practice your name, you can practice quotes that you like. Things that you need to take into consideration once more is the slope of the letters and of the different strokes. You want them all to have the same slope. You want them all to have the same spacing. Another rule of thumb so that you know how much space to leave between letters. You should leave at least two ovals between two different words. So that you have space to breathe and to see that it's actually a different word. You've got in the resources guide a few words that you can practice, a template that you can practice as well. Or you can practice any other kinds of words that you want. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will start looking into how to make this into the four calligraphy effect. See you there. Bye.
13. Faux Calligraphy Technique: Welcome back to the next lesson. In the last few lessons, what we looked into were the five groups of letters and how to draw them, or how to do them in a calligraphy style using the seven basic strokes. Then we moved on to putting it all together and writing quotes. Now we're going to actually apply the four calligraphy effect. Well, the key takeaway is that whenever you have a downstroke, you want that line to be thick. What does this mean? If we look into our seven strokes, so these are our seven strokes. What I want you to think about is, when are these strokes going down? For example, the upstroke it starts here and it goes up. The overturn starts here and it goes up and then down. This is a downstroke. Then you've got the underturn. It starts on the x-height, it goes down and then up. This is your downstroke and the underturn. In the compound curve you start on the baseline, you go up, down, up. This part is your downstroke in the oval, as I said before, we start here in the middle. Your downstroke will be here. In the ascending loop, you start in the x-height, you go up, and then come down. This will be your downstroke. Then in the descending loop, you start in the x-height, go straight down, and then you turn. So this will be your downstroke. If you were doing calligraphy with a proper tool that allows you to do thicks and thins. The way you will see these strokes would be an upstroke so thin and overturn then thick and an underturn starts with thick so down and then up thin. A compound curve goes up thick, and then up and oval up thick up, then an ascending loop down and a descending loop up. This is the effect that we are looking for with our four calligraphy guides and with our four calligraphy technique. What are we going to do in order to make them emulate this look? For example, I'm going to use a different color. If we do, I'll use the colors of the strokes that we've been using. The upstroke stays the same, the overturn up, down. You've seen that the up is thin and the down is thick. What we're going to do is we're going to thicken it on both sides of the downstroke to make it look like the calligraphy effect. Then I'm sorry, I just had a problem was my pen. I'm going to use a different pen for the underturn. The underturn starts with thick and then thin, so the thick line we want to thicken it from both sides. Then we've got the compound curve up, down, up, and we want to thicken it's on both sides. Then we can do the oval so start in the middle up, down, up, and we want to thicken both sides here. Then we do the ascending loop, up, down, and we thicken the downstroke here and finally the descending loop, and we thicken the descending loop. This is how you do the four calligraphy effect on our basic strokes. Now, if we want to apply this to our letters. Let's take, for example, a word, for example, love. I like doing four calligraphy as I go so per stroke or per letter so that I can calculate the spacing out between the letters correctly. Because if you start adding directly or if you write it out and then start adding, it might look a little bit wonky. For example, you can either do, let's do love. So upstroke L, and then you want to add the weight to the sides, so one side and then the other side. Then the O. You want to add weight to both sides, so one side and the other side. Then the short underturn. If you've noticed this was also down. Then another underturn and the small one for the V, and then the E for love. There you go. Let's do laugh. I forgot the U. This is the problem when you're doing calligraphy. You're so focused on doing the strokes that you end up doing a lot more typos. Let's do it again. L, and add the weight, oval, underturn, underturn, underturn, oval, descending loop, upstroke, ascending loop, add the weight, compound curve, and add the weight. As you can see, this is already looking quite different from our monoline word. The difference between the monoline and four calligraphy one. If you want to compare it with a calligraphy version, of course, this tip is not as thick as these ones and that's why you can see the difference, but nevertheless, I'll just do it. There you have it. This one was using the four calligraphy. This is the monoline alphabet. Finally, this one is proper calligraphy than with a brush pen. Go practice this technique. You have, remember, the sheet that you had. You also have it with the same words, but in this case with the four calligraphy technique. So you can trace these for example. The important part is to practice. In the next class, once you're confident with your four calligraphy technique, we are going to go forward and do our project where we are going to write a quote in four calligraphy to hang it on the wall. So I'll see you there. Bye.
14. Final Project: Welcome back to our project video. In this video, we are going to do our final project. We're going to apply the technique that we just learned for fake calligraphy. What I want to write is positive vibes, for my final project. What I've done here so far is, this is a regular A5 sheet of paper. I drew some grid lines, just so that I knew where to put my letters. Now, I'm going to do it in pencil so that it's easier for me to erase any mistakes if I find any. I'm going to start with my P for positive. In this case, since this is quite bigger than the size that we were practicing, and since I still don't know if it's all going to fit here, I'm just doing the outline, so the mono line here, so that I can fix anything that I might need. Another thing that I'm doing is, I'm leaving space in between, already, taking into consideration that I might add weight. I might know I'm going to add weight. It's not going to fit here as it is. You can already see because I still need the T, the I, the V, and the E. It's not going to fit, so let's just erase and start again. As you practice you will notice that, you will know all the strokes by height, and how they actually come together. In this case, I think, that I'm going to put the vibes starting earlier than I originally thought, so positive and now, vibes. I don't know if you can see this, but this is the draft for the positive vibes. Now, I'm going to trace this. As I trace each letter, I'm going to start adding weight, so here we go. In this case, for the P, I decided not to add the descending loop, so that I spare a little bit of space. We're going to add the weight on both sides of the stroke, and fill it in. One thing that you should also take into consideration, is the fact that each of the top lines are always straight, and the bottom ones as well. This is a characteristic of calligraphy. If you want to emulate it better, one of the things that you can take into consideration is to do all the strokes with a straight line, as such. When you're doing the fake calligraphy, start to make it thinner prior to the actual end of the curve, so that it looks a little bit nicer, and you want the curve itself to be thinner. The good thing here is that you can always correct any inconsistencies that you may have done. I'm done. This is your project for this class. What we need to do now is erase all the pencil marks. Eventually, if you want to add a little bit more doodles to make it look nicer, that's also a possibility. But there you go. You can actually do your very own fake calligraphy with this technique. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you in the final thoughts video.
15. Wrap up: That's a wrap. Here's how my final project looks like. You can always add some doodles to create more interest to the piece. Now you're equipped with a new lifelong skill that you can apply in so many occasions. Before we part, here are some key takeaway messages. Calligraphy is different from handwriting and lettering. Calligraphy is made out of basic strokes that form the different letters. It is important to take your time whilst making those strokes to make the basic shapes as cohesive as possible. You will come to realize that cohesive strokes, same shape, same slant, same negative space, will make the letters look that much better. To create the full calligraphy effect, always remember to create thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes. Remember, practice makes progress. Any five minutes you have, practice your strokes and your letters as much as possible. I'm so thankful for your time here with me, and I hope it was time well spent for you as much as it was for me. Please remember to post your progress and your final project. If you enjoyed this class, please leave a review. I love receiving feedback. Looking forward to seeing you in my other classes. Happy art creating.