Flourishing For All: Personalize Your Cursive Handwriting

1. Introduction: Some time ago, I decided that I wanted to improve my handwriting. In our digital age, it might seem like a lost art, but there's real value in this skill. It's not just about writting beautifully. It's a form of personal expression, a way to reflect and a moment to be truly present. When you write, your thoughts flow differently and freely. My journey started with practicing cursive, studying sensoria, business partnership, and developing my technique. Now, I'm excited to share with you the next step, Foshan. Hello, I'm Robert, and I'm passionate about human expression, creativity, and personal growth. Improving my handwriting has become a wonderful way to develop skills, focus my mind and see my own progress. That is why I want to share with you what I know about Forsa. Think of it as a step up from basic cursive, but not quite diving into full calligraphy. It's that sweet spot in between. Learning to add elegant embellishments to your everyday writing. Don't worry. You don't need fancy materials or perfect technique. The only requirement is knowing some basic cursive. We will build on that foundation, and I'll show you ways to add flare and style to your existing handwriting. In this class, we'll cover useful techniques, starting with foundational principles and warm up exercises. We will discuss guidelines for balance, grid, position, and the elements of different flourishes. We will see exit strokes, entry strokes, descenders, ascenders. I will also share my go to uppercase alphabet and ideas for flourishing longer phrases. Be honest, I do not consider myself an expert on this. As com ma mistakes. I'm still learning. But also because of that, I think that my approach and perspective will be great for you if you are just getting started with flourishing. Even if you already got some experience, I am sure that you can find some inspiration here. Through the class, I will provide practical tips and clear explanations. I will include resources for practice, but you might want to pause as we go along because we will really cover a lot. By the end, you'll have a toolbox of flourishing techniques to develop your own unique style. Remember, flourishing is about muscle memory and personal expression. I'll show you many options, and I'm sure with this, you will discover what works best for you. Whether you want to add elegance to a grocery list, make journal pages look amazing or create beautiful letters or handwritten cards, you'll have the skills to do it. Are you ready to transform the way you write? Let's dive in and start flourishing. 2. Getting Started & Project: Welcome to this class on flourishing. I'm excited to share with you some simple ways to add some flare to your cursive and everyday writing. Let's start by talking a bit more in depth about the idea with this class. We will see some few requirements and things that will be helpful. Also some things for when we begin practicing. Many people think that flourishing is only for fancy calligraphy, requiring special tools and lots of skill. You can definitely develop it into an incredible skill. I believe that knowing some degree of flourishing is enough to give a personal touch to our everyday handwriting. My goal here is to help you understand the basics, so you can apply them in a way that fits you best. For me, learning cursive calligraphy and flourishing has been mostly about improving my day to day. Process has been incredibly rewarding, even becoming a form of mindfulness practice. I invite you to approach this class as a time to relax, focus and develop a skill at the same time that you practice being present, being in the moment. Honestly, I think that trying to grite mindfully, paying attention and focus on what you have in front of you is the best way that you will have a much more enjoyable experience. Ideally, this class will not only be enjoyable and lead to visible progress, but also help you cultivate better hand griting habits, while getting rid of any not so good ones that may be blocking your development. This class, I have to tell you that you should know some cursive. If you need a refresher, check out my beautiful, easy to read cursive class. There's many different kinds of cursive, but specifically for what I will be teaching you, grinding on a slant is also very, very helpful. If you have trouble with that, try rotating your page and grinding in a straight line towards you. This will result in a natural slant once you straighten your page at the very end. Obviously, you will need a pen and paper. You don't have to go all the way and get a point of pin and calligraphy holder. You can if you want, but I won't be focusing too much on shading techniques in this class, so it's not necessary. What I do think is necessary is a tool that allows you to grid comfortably. I love using fountain pens because their mechanism let you grid with minimal pressure, which is very helpful because after all, flourishing is all about this natural flow that we can only achieve if we're grinding lightly and without restriction of movement. So, I highly recommend fountain pens, but any pen or mechanical pencil that doesn't require too much pressure will be okay. I will be using a personal favorite, a pilot falcon with soft extra fine nib. If you plan on using a fountain pen, I suggest that you go for a fine or extra fine nib to keep your lines clean. This is something that helps a lot when trying to make our griding legible. As for paper, if you go for a fountain pen or a calligraphy pen, you will need something that can handle ink well. I will be using R a notebook. If you are using a normal pen, then any paper will do. In the resources of this class, I will be sharing some guides that you can also print if you want. This is something that I use when I'm learning a new flourish or when I want to get really picky about my angle and consistency. It's not a requirement, but is there as an option if you think it will help you. Okay, since we're here at the very beginning, let me tell you about your project for this class. Write a phrase in cursive. Just do it with the style that you have right now. If you already know some flourishing, you can use it. No problem with that. Remember that we want more than just a single word here. A short phrase or even a sentence will work. Our emphasis on this class will be on trying to find a way to add balance and elegance on text that we can use every day. It's not just flourishing for the sake of flourishing, which could be done in a single word or even a single letter. Grite this right now, and when you complete this class and you have practiced what you learned, I encourage you to write the exact same phrase and share it here in skills. You have any questions by the way, feel free to ask anytime in the discussion section or when you post your project. I'll be happy to assist you to the best of my ability. All right, this would be enough to help us get started. In our next section, we will start warming up at the same time that I share with you some important flourishing principles. I hope that you are ready to learn how to make your grading look more elegant and personal. Get your pin ready and as see you soon. 3. The Basics, Position, & Movement: Let's dive into the basics of flourishing. Before we start creating beautiful flowing lines, we need to set ourselves up for success. In this section, we will already be doing some exercises so you can grab a paper and your pen. First, let's talk about posture, sit up straight, but stay relaxed. Your feet should be flat on the floor and your grinding arm should rest comfortably on the table. This position helps prevent fatigue and allows for smoother movements. To make sure that when your forearm is resting on your table, it forms this 90 degree angle. It will just make writing much more comfortable for you. Now, grab your pain and grip it lightly. A death grip will only lead to cramped hands and stiff lines. Hold it as if you were holding a small bird. Firm enough that it won't fly away, but gentle enough that it would not hurt it. Let's farm up with some exercises. Let's start with some ovals. Make large slanted ovals using your whole arm. Here we're not traveling, just doing ovals, one on top of the other one. Now, on the other direction, it's very important that you use your whole arm for this. As you can see, I'm not even resting on the desk. Now, let's go for something smaller. You don't have to move all your arm for this. You can just rest your forearm on the table. Same opposite direction. Finally, let's do some tiny ones. For this, you can just be moving your fingers. Do you feel a difference? When flourishing, I find it extremely useful to be switching between these three type of movements. The whole arm, only the fore arm, which is also called muscular movement, and the most common one is finger movement. There's a lot more that can be said about this, and I actually have a whole other class where I go very much into detail and exercises for movement technique. But for now, I just want you to be aware of the general differences. Sometimes you will feel too restricted if you're anchored to the disk with your greased, like you may be used to. So take some of this warm up time to experiment with something that will give you more freedom of movement. After you practice some slanted ovals, you can move on to horizontal ovals and do the same. I personally hold my pen like this. And only slightly touch the paper with my last two fingers. That way, I can glide around. Even though this is a more traditional grip for Spencerian and this kind of rushing, I personally do not think that it's super important that you force yourself to follow this tradition, because more important are the results and that you feel comfortable. Over time, and with practice, you will be able to adapt to your grip and overall position to what works specifically for you. After practicing those vals in the same place, we can start introducing some traveling and movement. Again, first slanted and then horizontal. You can stay in the same size or going from big to small and the other way around. Now, a few things. In flourishing, ovals are a big part of our foundation. This helps maintain a consistent flowing look. Generally speaking, aside from the oval shape, balance is also crucial in flourishing. I'm just giving you an introduction here. We will cover balance, and I will share with you more in depth information in the following lessons. But if you have a word or phrase that you want to flourish and it already starts with a big, very attractive, elegant parches, we will be learning ways to balance it with something similar on the right. The same goes for the top and the bottom. Now, here at the very beginning of our class, I want to tell you something important. Balance doesn't mean symmetry. It's about visual weight. We already practice some ovals, so less practice with some fear aids. This help with fluid transitions between upstrokes and downstrokes. Start large again in one place and gradually decrease in size. This is an exercise that many times actually can work as a flourish itself, because as I was telling you, this can help us have some visual weight. We can connect it to the senders, for example. While the concept of balance is not very hard to understand, it can get a bit confusing at the very beginning because you may feel like there's some balance missing, but you do not know what you need to put in there. Since I have told you that it's all about visual weight, then this means that it's not only about fligens. The text itself, how we position our letters and words are also important elements to consider when it comes to this balance. You already have an upper ese alphabet that you like with some flourishes and several words that individually add weight, you can focus on the end flourishes. This is why pieces with multiple words are generally easier to work with. The text itself contributes to the balance and visual weight, making the overall composition more cohesive. For example, if I want to fish the word weight alone, I do have to figure out more decorations for it so that it doesn't feel too heavy only on one side. If I write visual weight, it just turns out a little bit easier. The less the text, the forishes become more important because they stand out more. Remember, here I am trying to show you some general tips when dealing with flourishes. I am trying to use some very simple extensions or figures here, but we will see this and many more flourishes in the following lessons. Don't worry too much about getting this right right at this time. I just want to illustrate my points, which can be considered some guidelines for flourishing. Here's another tip that many beginners overlook. Avoid sharp angles and straight lines in your flourishes. They interrupt the flow and can make your work look rigid. Instead, aim for smooth curved transitions. Every line basically should have some degree of curving them. Another very important thing to know when you are doing forages, is that when lines cross, you should aim to do it at about a 90 degree angle. Of course, this rarely happens. But the closer that you get to that, it will make your forages look cleaner and intentional. One thing to mention is that if you start to do shading with calligraphy pens or fountain pens that allow it, you can always cross hair lines with hairlines or thick strokes with hairlines, but you should avoid crossing two thick strokes. Finally, when you plan to do flourishes, leave space. We want our flourishes to have room to breathe and grow naturally. Beginner, don't stress about cramming your work into a tiny corner of the paper. Instead, give yourself more space that you think you will need. This approach not only reduces anxiety, but also gives you the freedom to experiment and led your creativity flow. As a quick review, let me tell you some of the things that we talked about in this lesson. Slanted and horizontal ovals are the foundation for flourishes and will give everything a consistent flowing look. Try to practice switching between finger, muscular, and whole arm movement. The finger can only go so far, especially if you are anchored down. When you cross lines in your flourishes, try to do it as close as possible to 90 degrees. Balance doesn't mean symmetry but visual weight. The less the text, the flourishes become more important because they stand out more. Avoid sharp angles and straight lines in your flourishes. When you're flourishing, don't start too close to the border of the page. Always leave space for your flourishes to grow naturally. All of the exercises that we did here should help you loose an phabit. Some of the flourishes that we will learn are also based on these simple movements. But still, I highly suggest that you look for example, alphabet of your favorite flourished letters. I'm talking here mostly about per case because there's so many options out there. Remember that these principles that I've given you are guidelines, not strict rules. As you practice, you'll develop your own style and as we go through the next few lessons, we will continue to review some of them. The key is to stay relaxed, keep practicing, and most important, have fun with it. 4. Freeform Flourishing: In this section, I want to start going into some basic flourishes that I use all the time. I want to tell you how to look for spots where you can introduce flourishes and show you some ideas to start creating these extensions and strokes that add some balance in an elegant and easy way. First, I want you to forget about perfection here. Let's cover this more in the spirit of free form fliion, which is all about letting your creativity flow. Don't worry if your lines are perfectly smooth or if your loops aren't perfectly symmetrical. The beauty of what I want to show you here lies in its natural organic feel. Let's start by writing a single word here. Let's do symphony. This upper case is something that would be considered more modern. It doesn't really belong to any traditional calligraphy method as far as I know. But I want to use this here to tell you that when it comes to flourishing, and especially if you are someone who likes to improvise and try to come up with something new each time, it's a good idea that you look for letters that give you an opportunity to easily extend them. What do I mean with this? When flourishing, usually the uppercase letters carry more visual weight in themselves. There's many different alphabets that you can get inspiration from. But if I wanted, I could choose a different kind of S that could be more flourished. This may look nice, but at the same time, I am a bit more restricted because I do not have a lot of different directions to go from here. I really like simple forms like this S to give me lots of room to experiment where I take those endings. Now, I got my word without any extra additions yet. I immediately start to look at the left to evaluate how heavy it is already there. I look at the right, to see how much balance I need to a. I look at the top, to see if it feels too empty and at the bottom. For the ending, when you are just getting started, the easiest thing that you can do is just follow the flow of the stroke itself. Here we end this word with a y, which makes it easy to just extend it like this, super simple, but it is still considered a flourish. We could also make it turn up. It works as another simple option. O S here is simple enough and has enough weight to balance this simple flourish at the end. But if I wanted more, I would first work more on the S, and then I'll figure out how to do something similar with the ending. These kind of flourishes, as you can see, are just an extension of those warm up exercises that we saw in the previous section. They still work great. My go to exit strokes and EC flashes are this. Let me do them with letter A. In these very simple exit fishes that I will show you, the val shape is very important. So you can always warm up with your letters like this. First, the most basic of all flashes may be a simple extension to our letter. If we want another variation, we take it a bit further. And if we want something a tiny bit heavier, we can even have another loop in there. Notice that I'm trying to keep that loop centered in the bigger val. Now let's do something different. Let's go towards the bottom. For another variation, we can extend a little bit more. We can also do another one adding an extra loop in there. This one breaks a little bit of the balance and symmetry, what still works as a more modern option. Now, for something different, we can try to go to the bottom like this. For another variation, we can go all the way and do something similar to a novel. And if we want more, we can start incorporating some of those loops that we used for practice before. You can easily adapt these flourishes to other letters. Here I am doing it on letter K. And now let me do it on letter r. As long as we are at the end of our word or line, this will work without issues. These are simple enough to quickly memorize and allow you to achieve a bit of balance in your words. Let's go back to the word symphony. Something similar to what we already have. After finding some balance between the beginning and ending of my word or phrase, I start to look at my descenders. In this case, we have three, and this p is pretty much in the center, so I'll go with that one. Let me do something super simple. Just an extension with sort of a wave. To give you my go to fishes for descenders. But let me take a moment here and look at our word as it is. Can you see the ovals on the flourishes? There's two on our S. O it flourish is also a slanted oval. Even in this descender extension, we can see that two ovals are our foundation. We can even loop back on that same flourish and we can see it more clearly. Now, this also works on any other descender. Let me do it on energy. Another variation would be to add a small loop on your way out. We can add the loop inside the center itself. This one is far from perfect. But remember that we're just seeing options here. It's always a good idea trying to mentally see the center of our vals when we do center loops around that. This one is definitely better. I am adding that loop back, that I did a few 4 " back. We can also take that exit stroke in a different direction. This one is more simple, but it's still something that I use often. If you want to use some of those warm up exercises, you can also do something like the horizontal eight. Here, let's just do two of those figures. Now let me do 18 and then close with a bigger loom. Sometimes I may even connect this with some extra spirals. Remember that all of these that I'm showing you here is more free for floss. It's all about trying to come up with simple extensions and different ways to find balance. You can do some practice in this way to loosen up and also your muscle memory learn to flow by itself. Now, there's also frogs for ascenders. But when you are just getting started, I highly suggest not to look into this yet. I will be giving you some options in the following lessons, but these are a little bit more complex and it's very easy to mess up. Instead, when I feel like there's balance missing from the top, I try to extend my first per is letter or I try to come back here with my last letter. The idea here is to add some weight at the top, while at the same time, we're adding some balance towards the right or the exit. I'm giving you some options here that I always have at the top of my head. When you look at this in a word alone, it is as if we were trying to enclose our word inside these decorations. Later, we will learn some extensions for ascenders. But these are a great and easier form of substitution for those. In my opinion, the top weight is not as necessary as the ending or the bottom, especially if you already have visual weight everywhere else. When you already got something of visual interest in the beginning, then the rest is all about finding a layout that works to create balance. It's all about balance. A quick tip is that when you have more than one line, you do not have to try to make everything perfectly centered. Forages can still make everything look like it fits together nicely. You're adding flourishes, always try to make them flow naturally from the letters. But what if you feel like you want to add balance or weight in the bottom area, and you don't have any descenders to work with. For example, in the word dance. Then adding an flourish that feels natural is not an issue since we already have that E here. But we see that there's no descenders. If I want to add some weight to this bottom, I can extend the stroke in letters like the letter n or the like this. If this was actually let's dance without descenders, the perks can also take care of the weight in the bottom of the first. I am just improvising here. Nothing formal. Just playful, improvised forages. Like I told you, I'm just going for more free form style here. It's fine to take a moment to look back and figure out what's missing. It's okay to do it again and again. You can even do the basic word with pen and experiment different forages with pencil. Which you can erase and redo. I have seen people practice these with onion skin paper or semi transparent paper. But I personally, I'm okay with redoing phrases or words as much as necessary. Practicing time is never wasted time. Let's practice together. Write out your name and then let's add some free foreign fishes to it. Start with the first letter. Can you extend one of the stroke into a flourish? Now look at the last letter. Can you add an exit flourish that complements the first one? In my case, since I like to cross my ts above the actual letter, I also can use this to create a loop back down like this, and I can somewhat use a similar stroke for my upper case here, ending they are. They don't have to be the same, but sometimes it helps to make the whole piece feel more cohesive. Some takeaways from what we saw in this lesson. Start with letters that are easy to extend. Begin with simple letters and as more fishes as you get better. After the first upper case letter, focus on the ending flourishes. The easiest way is just to extend the natural stroke of the last letter. Look at the top and the bottom of your word. You can add balance using simple shapes from your warm up exercises as flourishes or use some ideas that I gave you here. For longer phrases, don't worry about perfect centering. Start each new line a bit to the right, then use flourishes to bring balance to your piece. Don't get discouraged if your first attempts, don't look exactly how you want them to. Flourishing is a skill that improves with practice. The more that you do it, the more natural and intuitive it will become. The goal here isn't to copy someone else's style, but to develop your own unique flare. So let's keep practicing and learning. 5. Uppercase Flourishes: Welcome back, everyone. In this section, we're going to dive into uppercase letters. As I've mentioned before, these are often the first place that you may need to start adding flourishes to your griding. For a good reason, they are eye catching and can really elevate not only flourished pieces, but your hand griding in general. Now, remember what we talked about earlier, balance is key. We do not want to overwhelm our griding with too many fishes, especially in longer texts. For shorter pieces or when you want to add a bit of flare, uppercase and more complex forages can be perfect. We have covered some simple flourishing ideas in the previous section. But from now on, we will explore more formal options, including some common spensaran extensions, a few ideas that have gathered from ornamental caligraphy, modern caligraphy, and some copper plate. Once again, I want to encourage you to look for samples and alphabets on your own. But here, let me give you my go to when it comes to per cases. These options are easy to remember and great to have as backups. I will not focus on entire words here, per case letters isolated. Let's see if we can cover the entire alphabet in one lesson. You can see here I'm grinding these very basic letter shapes. These are just some simple forms I use for uppercase letters. And they're just in my mind whenever I write something. If I'm doing a more serious or bigger piece, I may stop for a moment and think more. Maybe I will look at some samplers or inspiration online. But even though these are simple, they are extremely useful. They're not really impressive yet, I know. But that's because they are the building blocks that we'll be using when we add flourishes a little bit later. Doing this in one take, so you are seeing my real process here. Usually, I'm moving my page a lot as I write. But here I'm trying not to move a lot to make this as clear as possible for you. Some letters might look a bit wonky. That's not the main focus here. What matters is how we connect the fishes to these basic shapes. The way you find these letters in the class resources, you could print them out and practice along with me. You can also try making a whole page of just one letter playing with different extensions. It's a great way to get comfortable with the shapes. Once you've got this down, let's move on to the phone part. For this, I'll grab a mechanical pencil. First, let's look at the entry strokes of our letters. Specifically, those that start at the baseline. For example, the entry stroke of letter A, I can do something like this. Another letter with a similar entry stroke is letter B. Here's a different option. We see this on letters F and I as well. Well I could use something like what I did on letter A and B, here I'll show you something different. Let's go around like this. C. It's totally not an issue if we repeat what we did on letter A, but I like that letter I allows for a full loop like the one I did on F. Letters and n have similar entry strokes. Let me give you another option here. For my n, in this case, I'll just repeat what I did before. If you wanted to keep it simple, you can also just do something like this. Here on letter R, I'll show you another simple loop which doesn't overcomplicate things. We covered S in a previous lesson. Remember that you can use any of the other options. For T, we do the same. But since I have a bit more space here. I wanted to show you this ornamental flourish that also works okay for this baseline extension. Here's another one, also ornamental. I do not use this very often, but I have in my mind as options. Keep in mind that while you could repeat what we did on letter F, it's easy to get both letters confused. The context of the letter or the word in which it is used will make it more legible. But here, let's just keep it simple. Now, let's look at strokes that seem to start in the air above the baseline. For B will add a simple loop at the top. D could be similar. It looks fine, but I often prefer going inside the existing loop for a refined. You can even extend it under the letter to add a little bit more of visual weight. Now, I will add a similar look to several more letters. F P R. Now I want to show you a special case. With, you can do exactly the same, simple. But flourish that I like to use sometimes is this small ribbon. This works for several upper case letters like Q V, y, W, For letter Q, here, I'll just do the loop we did before and let me show you another option. Look at what I do here on V. I will finish this line of uppercase letters with the same entry loop because I want to show you something interesting. The same cur V extension that I did here on letter V can also work for letter H and letter K, even though they just look different. Here's a letter H. For Letter K, in this case, I will teach you an option that is simple but super useful. Remember that I was telling you that the ovals are the foundation of our flourishes. There are some letters that offer the chance to directly do this shape. If you wanted something a bit extra fancy, you can even add an extra loop like I'm doing here Letter E. Let's look at other letters where we can use this l here's Letter O and the same works for Letter L. Oh, Hold on 1 second. Here on letter L, let me show you one entry stroke that is a bit different, but I also like to use. This is just like a slight curve here. Back to the val. You can also do that on letter g. You don't have to add loops and flourishes to every single exit or entry stroke. I just want to show you part of my thinking process here when I'm looking at these letters. Let's look at some strokes that end below the baseline. Just following the natural curve. Same here on Letter. Here, let me look back. Remember, similar strokes offer the same flourishing opportunities. All of these are interchangeable. I sometimes leave letter E open like this. But if you want something more fancy, you can add an extra loop. Letter, let me repeat the same. You don't even have to cross that extension like I showed you before on Letter E. You can leave it open. And I forgot to add that baseline loop here. Letter Q, just the same that I did in Letters. Letter U, and here on letter x, I can do the same. But letter x gives me an opportunity that I do not have in other letters. So I like to cross it like this sometimes. On L, I can turn around leaving it open like this again, or we can have this small lop. Actually, it's similar to one of those three foreign flourishes that we saw earlier. Let me extend letter R and M in the same way that we saw before. Now, B has this exit stroke, which is a bit different. I can extend it into an oval shape, and this extension actually behaves more like if it was a descender, like what we have on Letter G, for example. I could do the same as Letter B, but when we start looking at descenders that follow this same kind of stroke, there's a few more possibilities. I can simply look back like this, for example. If this was part of the word, it adds some nice balance in the bottom left. I can treat like this, doing a lo towards the bottom, like one of those free for flourishes that we saw before. Here on the J, I can keep it simple. Just look this back. I'll do something similar here on letter, y. For letter Z, let me show you something special. You can of course use this with any other descender. I'm just trying to give you another option here. This starts to look better. There's still some strokes that we can extend like here on the M. And we saw something like this before. Even a simple extension can be enough to bring balance to our letter. Like I'm doing here on later and we can look towards the top. I'm doing that on letter T, or simply towards the bottom. With all of this, you can always mix and match. Maybe you can even come up with some original extensions for yourself. Here on letter, let me give you two different options. One is like this. Leave a stroke that you can even extend even more if you want. Like this, just closing it back. O and Letter D also allows for this same kind of extension as I was showing. In Letter A, I can use a similar exit stroke, but A offers a unique opportunity in the opposite direction. Check this out. Sometimes I do this. This also works for letter M and N. Finally, let's cross letter A. This way to do it has this loop in the middle and feels very flowy. I like it. But if I wanted to keep it simple, I also can do it like this. I'm not satisfied with J, so here's another try. This works better. To be honest, for letter J, a lot of times, I just go for its expensaran variation. But it's one of those cases that leave you with very few extension options. As we start practicing, you'll notice that at first, many shapes will seem new. Don't worry. This is normal. Keep going and as we progress through the alphabet, these shapes will start to become more and more familiar. We're not just learning individual letters, but gathering inspiration that we can use across the whole alphabet. Keep going and soon you'll be adding beautiful forages to your griting without even thinking about it. Just to grab up this section, let me give you a couple of takeaways. Number one, when dealing with percase letters, look for entry strokes, exit strokes, and loops for potential forage points. Start with one or two forages per letter. It's a good idea to find similar strokes that you can apply to more than one letter. It's totally okay to lift your pen and reposition. In our next section, we will look at some exit fluents that are also more formal than the ones that we have already covered. Keep practicing those uppercase fishes and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Entry & Exit Flourishes: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our forging class. Today, we're learning some more exit fishes. As you might remember from our previous sessions, we have already explored some free form exit flourishes. Now, like we did with per cases, we're going to focus on more formal structured fishes that you can rely on when you need a bit more consistency in your griting. Ending fishes are my favorite because they a weight to words, phrases, and even full pages of text. They make your griting look more polished and can fix balance issues in the rest of the text. Let's start this with a simple form we saw in a previous lesson when talking about free form flourishes. This basic shape can serve as a foundation for a more traditional flourish. Instead of only leaving the loop at the center, we extend it to create a horizontal oval. This small change makes the flourish feel more complete. Another variation that follows the same form is this one. Instead of going towards the right, we can go towards the top. Now let's look at another flourish that we're familiar with. This is the one similar to our warm up exercises. In this exit flourish, we have one loop that can be placed in different locations to create a different loop. We can place it in the center of a bigger loop and extend it with an exit stroke at the top, for example, or we can bring it down to resemble a descender. When placing the loop at the bottom, we can also change the exit strokes direction, bringing it back to the top and around. Next, I'll show you a flourish that's great for extending towards the right. I mean, all exit flourishes bring some weight towards the right, but this one is just a bit more versatile. The reason for this is that it can be used to add balance to the top of our leer, or it can also serve to enclose our word if we need this. Another option for bringing balance to the right looks like the number two. This is the basic form. But I'll show you a slightly more complex variation. We'll create a loop and bring another loop to the center. Now if you want something more impressive, you can add an extra look like this. While there are many other flourishes, I believe these examples will give you plenty of possibilities. By the way, I have presented them in this specific order because I think it's easier to remember if you start with a simple form and gradually a more complexity. Let's look at some entry fishes. I have to admit I don't use many entry flourishes myself. I'm usually happy with the most flourish part of my words or phrases being in the first per se letters. In normal writing, I'm totally fine with a simple extension like this one that I'm showing you now. Sometimes I might add a small curve at the bottom. These are the tool that I use most often. I can also do something that looks more like an val. It works well too. If I want to add a bit more complexity, I can do this ribbon at the beginning of my words. It's still a good and simple option. The phrases that I will show you next, I know them and practice them. But honestly, I do not use them very often. Still, they are good to have in case I need some extra balance. Let's look at this rounded oval. It's like one we saw before, but this time it goes to the left instead of the right. We can also do something like that, number two exit flourish that we saw earlier, but as an entry flourish. Another entry floorish that can help us practice those warm up exercises is this one. We go towards the left and make some loops going to the bottom of our page. We can also treat this as if it was at descender, make a small loop at the center and bring that exit stroke down. If you want something that looks more impressive or complicated, you can also do this. Start towards the left, make a big loop, and we do as before. It's kind of like mixing the two previous flourishes. Let me do this flourish again because I'm not very happy with how it looks. We want that center loop to be more in the middle of our bigger loop like this. Yeah, that's a bit better. Let me try one more time. Much better. It's just a small detail that maybe nobody will notice. But it's good to keep in mind when we're practicing. As we wrap up this section, let's review while we have covered. We have explored more formal structured exit forages as a complement to the free foreign flashes we learned earlier. I showed you some entry forages as well, and with both entry and exit flourishes. We can bring balance towards the right, towards the left, to the top, or the bottom. It all depends on what we use and how we use it. It's always a good idea to start with a basic flourish and then learn variations with added complexity. This will help your muscle memory. While no one may notice small imperfections, it's always a good idea to practice keeping balance and centered loops in mind. Spend the next few minutes practicing some of these flourishes. Try to relax and let the fishes flow naturally. Remember that the more you practice, the more intuitive, these movements will become, I'll see you in the next sesion. 7. Ascender & Descender Flourishes: Back everyone. In this section, we're going to explore ascender and descender floss. These are a fantastic way to add balance and visual interest to the middle of words rather than just at the beginning or end, as we have seen mostly until now. Remember, as we practice this frogs, try to stay present in what we are doing. Not forgetting to pay attention to the consistency in space, slant, and size, not only of our fishes, but all of our letters. Let's start with some ascender froges. These are perfect for letters like B, H, K, and L. When adding fishes to ascenders, we want to enhance the natural flow of the letter without compromising legibility. Will show you some of my go to for this. I told you before that this can be tricky when you're starting out. Unlike other flourishes, where you can simply extend and exit stroke with its natural curve. Here, the way I mostly do it is leaving the stroke open when grabbing the word. Then I come back to add the flourish. The vertical top to bottom movement is not easy and it's something that I still need to practice more. Still, I want to show you some common forms. We'll begin with a basic loop. Next, we can extend that loop and add another one at the end. We can also go in a different direction downwards, or we can extend it upwards. We might even add another loop at the end. Now, let's add a loop in the center. H use this one lot. Let's step back and make another simple option. We also have room in there to add a small loop. This is similar to what we did in other flourishes that we already saw before. We can also cross it to add even more weight to the top. While most of these add weight towards the right, you can also do it towards the left. Here's a simple extension with a small loop. Do you need more? You can also add a ribbon like flourish that we saw earlier. There's also this traditional flourish that is a good option, even though because of its form, it's a little bit more complicated to get right. Now, the letters, D and T are a bit different. D has its shape on the opposite side from other ascenders. Can treat it the same as all the others. No problem with that. But here we have the opportunity to do something different and extend it like this. Since we have a different loop, we can also play with it to add a small decoration like this or bring it more towards the top. If you ever need something with lots of whistle weight, you can also try this. With T, we have a crossbar. I personally like to cross it in the air like this, but you can also do it on the actual stroke. You can add weight to the right towards the bottom, towards the top. You can add a loop at the beginning, or you can add a loop at the end. You can also do something a bit heavier here in the left. D and T also work great for exit flourishes. For D, you can go towards the right like this and you can even do some more stuff with that exit stroke. With T, you can turn the crossbar into a flourish. There's a special case when you have two ascenders together and you need to connect them. This way is to extend them like this. For something else, you can have a loop at the end. I want to show you this other option. Simply extending the second ascender and using the first one to grab it around like this. Let me write belly. Sometimes, especially with T, you don't need to do the crossbar if there's an ascender next to it. For example, in T, the H can have a small flourish that covers the T function. Doing this adds visual interest to your flashes. It's always good idea to look for ways to make your flashes do more than one job. Now that we have seen ascenders, let's move on to the sender flourishes. Let's start by extending the exit stroke towards the bottom. We can also curve it up. We can add a small loop in there too. Or instead of turning up, we can turn down if we want. For a bolder look, we can make the loop bigger. There are so many options here. I already showed you this before, but I wanted to show you how we can transform it into something else. We can bring that exit stroke back up or extended like this. If we don't want to go so far towards the right, we can do a lob like this too. We can also bring it to the left like this. This is another type of closing that's good to know, and we can use it as a simple curve towards the top. And of course. I showed you this earlier when we looked at upper kiss letters. It works here too, just as another option. There's two things that I need to measure. First, the letter is. It's one of those letters we can extend into a descender flourish. If you want, you can even do more elaborate stuff like this. I don't do this often, but it's an option if you want something bold at the end of your word or phrase. The other thing is how to deal with double descenders. The simplest way, in my opinion is to make the first descender very basic, then use the second one to grab around the first one like this. You can extend the first descender to make it more complex, but it's harder to keep everything balanced. You can also have an extra loop at the end like I'm showing you here. Honestly, I prefer the simple version. Let me write nugget to show you how it looks in action. I'm excited to tell you that I'm done with all the flourishes that I have planned for this class. As we start wrapping up, I know that I've given you a lot of info and a lot of flourishes. Now it's up to you to practice, practice, practice. In the next session, I'll share with you some useful tips that will help you in this practice time. I want to give you some ideas to keep in mind, and I also want to give you some closing tips that will be helpful so you can continue improving as you go forward. So stay with me. We're almost there. See you soon. 8. Closing Thoughts, Ideas, & Tips: A Wow. I'm so happy that you have made it this far. In this video, I want to give you some closing thoughts, ideas, and tips that will be helpful as you continue your flourishing journey. First of all, I have to say that I have focused on showing you many forms and possibilities, but not so much on how to achieve perfect technique. Do not worry. I promise you. Once a lot of these fishes are part of your memory, you'll figure out how to adapt the technique in a way that works for you. At this point that we are at the end of this class, I suggest that you go back to earlier lessons and pose wherever you need to practice individual fishes over and over. It's tempting to add as many fluorites as possible to one word. You can definitely do that if you want. You can look for words that offer flourishing possibilities towards the right, the left, up and down. Honestly, though, just because I have given you lots of options, doesn't mean that you have to use them all the time or on every single word. The best way to practice is to look for ways to incorporate flourishes in your everyday writing. By practicing with more than a single word is that you will learn how to balance all your layout. Your flourishes should make your text stand out and look beautiful, not overpower or distract from your words. One thing that I want to mention is that the size of my flourishes in this class might seem larger than what you use in everyday writing. That's because I was focused on the flourishes alone. But smaller text can also be flourished with bigger strokes. When you write a node, think about which uppercase letter you can use at the start or where you can fit an exit flourish. If you need to take your mind off something, you can just grab a piece of paper and start practicing flourishes, even as a form of relaxing. Let me emphasize this one more time. Highly suggest a lot of individual practice on flourishes before stepping up to add words. You do not have to know all the ones that I have showed you by memory. If you is okay, you can always come back and practice some more. But understanding balance and maybe the overall shape of the fishes is something that should be present from the very beginning. Remember, practice makes perfect. If you want to improve your foundation, don't forget to check my other cursive class. Also, don't miss the class that I have on movement technique. These two will be very helpful to you in your cursive or Caligraphy journey. See this class as a foundation of flourishing. There's still so much more to explore. There are specific aspects like connections, shading. I know that here I did not focus so much on practice and how to incorporate these flourishes in actual text. But that's because I think that's kind of the next step. After you have practiced and memorized some of the options that we saw here. I'm thinking about maybe doing a short class on flourishing only one phrase and analyze many different possibilities on it. I don't know if this would be a good idea or not. Your feedback really helps me create more targeted classes. So if you found this one helpful, I'd appreciate that you give me some feedback for which direction you'd like to see me go. Now, for your own personal development, I suggest that you look at other alphabets, samples online, Instagram accounts, there's inspiration everywhere. When you're browsing, analyze how different artists incorporate flourishes into their work. It's always a good idea, trying to spot the val synder. This can really help you develop your own unique style. Continue your flourishing journey, consider creating your own custom made sampler. While it's great to copy and learn from others, having your own personal reference guide can be incredibly helpful. It allows you to keep track of your favorite fishes and see your progress over time. Since we're talking about progress, it's time for you to revisit the project that I mentioned at the start of this class. Now that you have practiced all of these flourishes, strokes, and possibilities, it's time to return to that initial phrase that you wrote down. Your new skills, try to read it again. This time, be strategic about your flourishing. Think about word placement, balance and how to create a unified complete piece. I am sure that you will be surprised by your own progress. I really hope that you will share your work here in sculpture. Your creation could inspire other students, and it helps me see how the class has been useful to you. It always brings me joy to see student projects. You can request feedback. But even if you just want to show off your work, that's great. I'm excited to see what you create. I'm always here to help, so feel free to ask any questions. And please do not forget to leave a review if you enjoy the class. It really helps with visibility and encourages other students. Keep practicing, stay inspired, and happy flourishing. Remember, every stroke that you make is a step towards mastering this beautiful art form. Enjoy the process and don't be too hard on yourself. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.