Transcripts
1. Class Preview: Have you ever looked at a piece of beautifully flourished calligraphy and thought, how did they do that? I know that I definitely have. My name is Kim and I'm the calligrapher and owner behind Hoopla! Letters and when I was learning calligraphy, I found flourishing to be the most intimidating and frustrating part. I just didn't understand how it was done. It wasn't until I broke it down step-by-step and identified the rules for creating flourishes that I was able to start flourishing confidently. Now this course is going to be great for calligraphers, but it's also going to be helpful if you're into hand lettering or chalk art, or even just want to oomph up your own handwriting a little bit. Now that being said, I do recommend you take my Introduction to modern brush calligraphy course before this one, if you haven't already, that'll give you a good foundation of the calligraphy basics, and we'll help you get the most out of this class. If you're ready to start flourishing confidently, I hope that you will join me for this course. See you soon.
2. Intro & Materials: Hi everyone, and welcome to class. My name is Kim Schrank, and I'm the calligrapher and illustrator behind hoop law letters, and today I'm going to teach you all about flourishing. There are a few things you're going to need for class. One, you're going to need some paper, and I highly recommend using a dotPad. This is my favorite Rhodia dotPad, I love it so much. I like using dotPad because it gives you a nice little grid and lines to work without being too overpowering. You're also going to want a pencil and eraser, as well as a bullet tip pen, and then of course you're going to want some brush pen. In today's class I'm going to be using the Pentel sign brush. You're going to want to use a brush pen that has little to no flexibility. Now, for the most part in class, we're going to be sticking with the pencil and the bullet tip, because with flourishing, I find that it's best in the beginning to practice making the movements and the shapes before you worry about pressure. If you're not a calligrapher, like let's say you are hand-letterer or you just want to pretty up your bullet journals, totally fine, you don't need to have a total mastery of calligraphy to be able to learn something from this class until of course, we get to the inking portion. That being said, I do recommend that all students take my Intro to modern brush calligraphy online class. That's going to give you the basics of calligraphy that you need to know to really get the most from this class. If you've taken it before, go ahead and give it a refresh. I would especially re-watch the grip and movement section as well as the 10 basic strokes section. If you've taken any of my classes before, you know the way that I like to break things down is by starting very small and working our way up. What that means in the context of this class is that we will first start by breaking down what flourishes you can use on what strokes. For example, if your letter or word starts with an upstroke, what flourishes can we add to that? We're really going to break that down stroke by stroke. From there, we're going to move up to letters. I will show you how we can use those different flourishes for those specific strokes in letters, I'll give you demos of what that looks like. From there, we'll move on to words and I will show you how to flourish a final word and phrase, and then I've got a little special bonus for you at the end, I think you're really going to love it. Now, one thing I do want to talk about before we dive in, are a couple little terms that I will be using throughout the class. First, of course, is flourishing. A flourish is just an embellishment that you add onto your words. Flourishes can be done in calligraphy, but also in hand lettering and just regular old handwriting, it's any kind of embellishment that you're going to add. A swash is any flourish that comes directly off a letter. For example, a really loopy long tail on a J or a Y. Now, a lot of people use those words interchangeably swash and flourish, and it's not exactly true. I want to be grammar police here, but it's not exactly true. A swash is a flourish, so all swashes are flourishes, but not all flourishes are swashes, I think that's like transitive property math, I don't know, I'm not a math person. Anyway, that being said, I'm going to refer to everything we do today as a flourish though, I may specifically call out swashes when we're doing crossbars and little add-ons to our capitals and things like that. Just so you know the beginning, those are some of the terms that I will be using. Without any further ado, go ahead and grab up your supplies, and I will see you in the next lesson for an overview of the six basic rules of flourishing.
3. 6 Rules of Flourishing: In this section, we are going to talk about the general rules of flourishing. Now, it's important to remember that flourishing is an art, not a science. There are a million in a one ways to do it, and these are just a few general rules to keep in mind, and as you're working on your flourishes. Now, there are going to be times that you'll want to break these rules. As we move further in this class and as we start to really practice, I will share some of those times with you, but it always helps to have some guidelines to get started. For now, here's what you need to know. Rule number 1, is all about balance. You want to keep your flourishes balanced. There's no need to break out like scales here, you just want to keep your overall word or your layout, if you have multiple words balanced. You want to keep the weight the same, all the way around, or at least have it evenly dispersed. You can imagine that your word has actual weight to it, you don't want it like to be top-heavy, you don't want to be falling over. You can see here that we've filled in the space, this negative space here, so we have a nice, pretty solid block. Everything feels pretty balanced, there's no area that feels super top-heavy. This is just one word, let me pull out my sketchbook. This is my personal sketchbook, Be Groovy or Leave Man. This actually is going to be a mural in our new home here in Phoenix. You're seating a little behind this seats here, you can see with this layout, this has several different words in it. It's not just one word that we're trying to keep in balance. You can see that, it's like if it were weighted, if every line was weighted, it would stand pretty still. Now, there are two different balance that you want to look out for. The first is what we've been talking about, which you want to have balance in the line that you've got around. In other words, if there was weight to the line, you'd want to make sure that it's all pretty evenly dispersed, but the other part is not the line, it's the negative space, so you want to make sure that your flourishes are all pretty similar in the amount of negative space that they provide. If you look around here, we don't have any super tight flourishes with the exception of this little guy right here that's to fill in a little bit of space. Most of the flourishes are really big and wide open. If we take a look at this one as well, we do have some little loops are for the most part the negative space feels balanced as well. Let's take a look, let's use an example here from the old sketchbook. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in. Here we go. If we look at this first example here we can see pretty balanced. We have some nice little simple flourishes at the beginning and end here, a little add on flourish underneath. Everything feels like if the add lines had weight to it, it would stand pretty still. Now, taking it down to this one here, maybe not so much, these lines add weight to it. This would be lean and pretty heavily in this direction. It's not evenly balanced. Now, if this were part of a layout and there was another word right here, then okay, but on its own, not balanced. We see the same here, while if we look at the word, it looks like pretty much same amount of space is taken up. We look within the flourish and we see this one is really tight and curly cute. This one is wide open. So there's less negative space showing in this one than there is not this one and it's a pretty significant amount. It makes it seem really of kilter. You want to consider those things when we talk about balance. Again, remember, that it's not just the balance of the word or layout in terms of the lines, but also balance within the negative space that it creates. Okay, let's zoom back out here, Here we go. Our second rule, rule number 2 is that you want to move your flourishes in opposite directions with each turn. So if we take a look at this, you can see the example here. We've got a U. It first moves to the right, then to the left, back to the right back to the left, back to the right again. It changes direction with each turn, same up here. We go from left to right, back to left. Little D toward to right and this little tiny loop, back to left, back to right. You want to keep your flourishes moving in opposite directions. Otherwise, you might have some instances when you're trying to fill in a lot of space, at top or on bottom, where you really move in one direction a lot and then back just a little bit, but it's that back just a little bit is important. You want to keep them moving in opposite directions. Now, one thing to note here is that those opposite directions are almost always left to right. They're not going to be really up and down, and the reason for that is we need our flourishes to cross. That is rule number 3. Flourishes are all about creating loops. In other words, with each change of direction, the flourish should cross over another part of the flourish. Again, this is for the most part, there might be some instances where it will work to, do not do that. But for the most part, you do want to cross back over. We'll do a little example here. Go ahead and Zoom on in, let's do the letter Y. That's a really fun one to flourish, lowercase Y. We're going to start with our flourish here, so we're going to move from the left, back to the right, back to the left. You can see with each turn it crosses over on itself. We can do that in another way here. Don't worry, we will get into all the many ways to flourish as we continue. But you see with each turn and moves in an opposite direction, and then it crosses over itself, creating these nice, pretty little loops. Now, let me show you one instance where that might not apply. Lets say we were ending our word the letter S, and we decided to bring our flourish up and over. So we brought up and over. You notice, well, there's no cross there. There isn't a cross there, but we have moved from to right back to left. Then if we were going to make another turn, there would be a nice little cross there. Again, it's for the most part, there are some instances like when you're looping the final letter back up over the word where you might not have a cross. But you do want to remember that this is all about creating loops, moving in the opposite direction and crossing one another. Zooming out. Rule number four, I'm going to pull out my be Groovy or leave man as example again. Rule number four, is that when the flourish is a swash that is originating from your letter, you want to use a hairline. If we take a look here, we can look at this v. You can see I have this nice little flourish coming off a little swash and that it stays the same thickness throughout even though I'm moving down, I'm not applying any pressure, I'm not getting a thick line. You can see the same over here with this G. Once that down-stroke ends we're going into that downward loop, it all stays pretty thin. Now the reason for this is we want this to be legible. If you start to add thickness, it can be confusing what's the letter and what is the flourish. You want to make sure that you are keeping that pressure really, really light. Now, flourishing requires, we'll get into this actually we're going into it now. The next rule, rule number five, is that the movement and flourishes has to come from your elbow and shoulders. Because it needs to come from your elbow and shoulders, you need to have a really nice loose hand. If you've taken any of my calligraphy classes before, you know that this is how we're supposed to be doing brush calligraphy all the time, elbow and shoulders. However, you know there are some tiny movements where we'll use our fingers and our wrist that's okay, but with these flourishes, especially these big wide ones to get a nice smooth line and nice big open curves we want to be really using that shoulder and the elbow. If you rely too heavily on your wrist you're going to end up with really herky-jerky flourishes, that's going to be oddly shaped because you don't have the same range of motion. Now, because we're using these big full arm movements, it might be tricky in the beginning to get these nice thin hair lines as you move through your flourish. That's a big part of the reason why I recommend for this class to stick in the beginning, we're going to stick with pencils and pens with a bullet tip. This is a favorite Castell artist brush pen with 1.5 bullet tip. I really like this when I'm practicing my flourishes because they're dark enough for me to see, but I can focus more on the shapes and less on perfecting the pressure because that's going to come later. Now, if you do want to dive in with a brush pen again, I recommend you try this first, but if you're, "Kim, I got to do this. I got to do it right now," go with the brush pen that is less flexible. You could even honestly a standard Crayola broad tip pen would actually work really well for this, because there's no flexibility at all. You can get those nice thin line even if you're shaky on the pressure. Then this brings us to rule number six. Rule number six, a final rule. That is that flourishing should highlight the word, it should not overpower. I did a little fun overkill example for you. That is total overkill, although I will say super fun to do. It's really fun to make lots of loops, right? Because it is so fun, it can be easy to go overboard. I'm sure, I guess I shouldn't say I'm sure, I don't know your life. But many of you have probably seen Jurassic Park. It's a favorite in this household. If you're not familiar with Jurassic Park, they bring all the dinosaurs back to life and they have them in this amusement park. One of the main characters played by the fabulous Jeff Goldblum said, "You were too busy worrying about whether you could, to think about whether you should." Yes, that's a little bit more dramatic when it's about dinosaurs but it's the case here too. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. You don't want to overpower the word. The flourish after all, it's made to highlight the word, not overpower it. Those are your six rules for flourishing. We're going to go ahead and just recover those one more time. Rule number one, keep it all balanced both in the line work even in the negative space. Rule number two, move in opposite directions with each turn, if your first turn is to the right, then the next turn is going to be the left. Rule number three, flourishes are all about creating loops. You want to for the most part, every time you make a turn with your flourish you're going to cross over another part of the flourish. Rule number four is when the flourish, is a swash originating from part of a letter, you want to keep a thin hair line for the most part. There may be times that changes, but for the most part you want to keep a thin hairline to keep readability super high. Rule number five is that the movement for flourishes really needs to originate from your shoulder and your elbow, not your wrist. This is the best way to get really lovely curves and not herky-jerky motions. For now I recommend again that use a bullet tip pen, a pencil, or a brush pen with little to none flexibility. Finally, rule number six, flourishing should highlight the word not overpower it. This is the Jurassic Park just because you can, doesn't mean you should kind of scenario. Those are, again, the general rules for flourishing. In our next lesson, I'm going to show you some drills that you can do to prepare to flourish like a champ. See you there.
4. Flourishing Drills: Before we get into the different kinds of flourishes that we can do, it's going to be really helpful to do some drills. If you haven't already, go ahead and download the flourishing drills sheet. If you don't have access to a printer, that's no problem at all. I'm going to be showing you how to do it on my.grid paper here. But this can be helpful to have not only now as you're doing this, but, of course, later on as you are practicing. We'll go ahead and get into it. Now, the purpose of drills is not only to practice these common shapes, but it's also to help build muscle memory. No matter how experienced you are, it's always a good idea to do a few of these drills before you start doing your flourishing work. Again, I want you to get either a pencil or some bullet tip pen because, again, we want to focus on the movement here, not so much on the pressure. The first few drills that you see on the sheet here, this first line, these are all stationary drills. What that means is that we are going to start doing our drill and we are going to just repeat it over and over and over again. We're not going to be moving across the page. We have an oval, a Celtic knot, and then I don't know what this is. Like a little O, it's like a hula hoop on it. That sounds good. We'll call that a hula hoop O. Let's go ahead and try these here. Now, you'll notice on the drill sheet, it has a little red dot. Those little red dots are where you're going to start. I'm going to go ahead and zoom on in here. Again, for these, you're just going to be repeating these motions over and over again. Don't worry about getting it perfect. You see, I made a big line in there. What I'm doing here is, I am moving with my elbow and my shoulder. I'm going to start another one. I'm moving with my elbow and my shoulder. I'm just getting used to this motion. Try a couple a little slower. I'm going to slow it down a little bit. Really, use that elbow and shoulder. Now, for the Celtic knot, what you're going to do is, you're going to start below the first little teardrop. You're going to start toward the bottom of that. You're going to loop over to the left, loop back to the right, back over to the left, and then it connects. Then you're just going to follow that path. Again, using that elbow, using that shoulder, let's just get that muscle memory go in there. We'll start another one here, a little bit bigger. There we go. You can try large ones, small ones again. This is just helping with our muscle memory, helping with those muscles and you're working that arm and that shoulder. It's really easy, especially if you're doing a smaller one like this. A little small. It's really easy to stop and just use your wrist. We don't want to do that. We want to use our whole arm. Think of your hand if you've taken my Calligraphy class before you've heard this analogy. You want to think of your hand as an air hockey puck. You want to imagine that this paper is like those old air hockey table with the air puffing up in a hot puff, just like the slides along the top of it. You're just going to glide that hand along being guided by your elbow and your shoulder. Now, the next one. Let's sew. What do we call this? The hula hoop. I love it. For this one, we're going to start on the left-hand side. We're going to curl over. Do another loop due and curl that back around. Once you have that first one made, you can start tracing. Again, use that elbow, use that shoulder. We can try. Let's do a larger one here. We're going to start on the left side, sweep over, make a little curly cue and then connect back. Again, we're not worried about making this perfect right now because with this first one, all you're doing is creating a path for your pencil or your pen to follow. You see here that it's bigger. Work on that arm movement. Get that muscle memory gone. Those are our stationary drills. We've got our oval, our Celtic cross and our hula hooping out. Then for the next batch of these, these are all moving. With these, you are going to move over toward the right as you go. On the drill sheet, you have a few practice ones up here and then you have an opportunity to practice tracing this and then just continue along. Again, just in case you don't have a printer, no problem at all. We can do that without this drill sheet. The drill sheet is just a little something extra for you. Again, we're not going to worry so much about being perfect. We want to just try to keep these loops the same size as we go across. Now, as you move, you're going to swing back over the previous one. We actually use this. It's just a little bit darker since we're not tracing over the invented dimes. We'll mix so you can see here. Again, we're going to curve to the right, then just like with our flourishes, how they move in opposite directions, and we're going to curl the left, back to the right, and then we're going to overlap it. We're just going to keep doing that all the way across the page. Again, you really want to work that shoulder. You can also try it where they don't overlap if that's a little easier for you, and then get back into the overlap if you'd like to try that. Once you feel pretty good at that, we'll move on to the next one. It's the same thing, but instead of going over, we're going to go under. Really, use that elbow and shoulder. Again, don't worry so much about what it looks like. You can see mine is not totally perfect there. Don't worry so much about what it looks like. You want to just get that motion going with your arms. Then the next batch, these are drills that, instead of going from left to right, these are going to go top to bottom. Our first one here is an infinity sign. Again, using that elbow and shoulder. The last one it's the infinity sign. We're going to go ahead and overlap. You might want to slow this one down a little, overlap. Here we go. These are just some drills that you can practice before you get started with your flourish work. I find these really, really helpful. Like I said, it doesn't matter how experienced you are. These are going to be super, super helpful as you're going, especially as you're just starting out. Remember, don't worry so much about what they look like. This is more about getting that movement with your arm instead of with the wrist and fingers. What will probably happen, especially with these moving ones, is that the first few strokes will be wonky. Even if you look at mine, you can see. The first couple are like O and then you get into the rhythm of it. Don't worry again about what it looks like but do a few of these. I would recommend before you start any flourishing work, do at least this. You can, of course, always do more. You don't have to spend hours on it, but I'd say take 5-10 minutes to do this before you start any flourishing work just to get warmed up, just like you would stretch before work out. This is you're stretching before we get into flourishes. In our next lessons, we are going to be actually getting into flourishes. I'll see you there.
5. MODELS: Beginning of Upstrokes: Hey everyone, it is finally time to start flourishing. Hooray. Yes, I'm super excited obviously. In these videos I'm going to show you different flourishes that you can use depending on the stroke and where it is located within the word or within the letter that you are trying to flourish. Remember, not an exhaustive list, these are just some options to help you get started. Honestly, these are a lot of the ones that I use in my own work. You're getting a little peek behind the curtain here, so to speak. Our first batch of flourishes, these are flourishes that are used at the beginning of upstrokes. These are letters that start with a thin hair line, a V-shape, or an upward loop. With these flourishes, you're going to actually start by creating the flourish and then move into the letter. I'm going to show you a few, again I'm going to be using a bullet point pen. You can also use a pencil. We're not going to worry about pressure right now. We're just going to focus on creating the shapes and working on our movement. After I show you the different flourishes, I will demo some letters with a brush pen so you can see what it looks like. All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom on in. Let me zoom in a little, but of course. Let's get started. These are flourishes for the beginning of our upstrokes. We'll start by just taking a look at what the upstroke looks like. Remember, there is our upstroke. Really basic flourish that you can add at the beginning of these is just a nice little curl. You can take that up a notch, by starting it on the right side of the upstroke there. Or we can add a turn. Let's start on the left will move to the right, sweep it back to the left, start that upstroke. When we have left and we changed directions and move back. You'll see that with this, we also made sure that we crossed with each movement. We move to the right and then with left we cross and over into the right again. Let's add another turn there. Move it to the left, sweep it right, and then start our upstroke. That was just one more turn. We have to the left, to the right, back to the left, back to the right. You're just changing your direction with each turn. Notice how we have lots of nice intersections here, lots of nice little loops that we created within the negative space as well. Let's do this one again, and we're going to add a little something to it. One letter that works really well with these flourishes, one letter that starts with a thin hairline is the capital A. One thing that we can do, is we can add a swash onto our little side flourish here. A swash is just going to be anything that comes off a letter. We already talked about those definitions, but you can add them onto your existing flourishes if you want to give it a little bit of amp. If we have this as the capital letter A and we wanted to cross it, we could actually start that cross from the loop and we have a nice little add on to our flourishing. We can also loop it there. You could start and move it all the way over. But let's say, this is something you wanted to do at the end or you didn't really want to have that loop there. That's something that you can add at the end. Let's try it more turn. Right, left, right, left, right. Let's add a little loop de loop in there. What do you say? Bring it back, here's a little loop de loop. Even though we're still moving up here, you can tell we still have had direction paint changes. They've been small though. We went left, right, left, that little loop went left and then that little loop went back right and then it went left again and then it went right again, that's a lot of turns. Do I need to do this left, right, like when you trying to remember. Is that just mean that it does that left, right. Well, it is what it is. Calligraphers there just like you. They forget their left and their right sometimes. Let's end it with one more. I really like this shape, but instead of making it so these loops are butting against each other and look like a little pratso, which I totally did. But let's see what it looks like if they were a bit more parallel. That can be a really nice with a more formal alphabet as well. Now that we've had a chance to practice these, I'm going to show you what they look like within letters. I'm using the pen towel sign brush today. Let's start with the letter M. We did our flourish, go right in to the letter M. Love that. That look super pretty. If you wanted to add a swash under this to fill in some of that negative space, you could do that. But you don't have to. Let's try this one like we did with our capital A. Let's do a capital A here. You can see how that works. I will say, these work best with capital letters, because with the lowercase letters, you run the risk of the letter not being legible. But if you're really careful with your thin hair lines, then you can definitely make it work. Let's try one of the simpler ones. We'll do the one with just the couple of turns, going to the letter R there. That's a big R. But you can see that this is a nice hairline, so it looks like a letter R with a little flourish at the beginning. But if I were to have added thickness there, now it looks like eR. You've got to be really careful. Like I said, these do work best when you are choosing the uppercase letters. In the next video, I'm going to show you flourishes that you can use at the end of upstrokes.
6. MODELS: End of Upstrokes: In this video, I'm going to show you flourishes that you can use at the end of upstrokes. These can be done with letters that end in a thin hairline, a U-shape, a V-shape, upward loops, and whiskers. With these, whereas the flourishes at the beginning of upstroke, started with a flourishes and moved into the letters. With these flourishes, these are going to start with the letters and then move off into the flourish. That's just something to keep in mind as I show you these. We're going to start with our bullet tip, I'm going to Zoom on in. For our first one, we've got our upstroke, we're going to push up. I'm going to swing it out to the right and swing it back to the left. I'm going to add another turn to it. A lot of fun there. Again, we're talking about turns, right, left, right again. Let's add another turn. Shall we? Let's add another turn. Right, left, right, left. What a fun. Now let's do one more that swings to the right and we're going to add a little curly cue to it. Come in here we going to make a little curly cue and then swing it out. That's really fun. I like that a lot. So with these, it swung out to the right and then pulled left. Now let's go ahead and we'll try some that move to the left first and then sweep right. One of my favorites, pulls to the left and then sweeps right. Let's try. Let's do another turn. Love it? Little delicate one there and you can also make that much bigger if you wanted to add, fill in some more space there, let's try one more with another gloss. Let's do another curly cue. Love it, love it, love it. That's real whimsy right there. They can be really fun for a very whimsical alphabet. Now I want to show you a quick example, so this flourishes are super great for filling up space to create that balance. Now it's especially great when words like this one, where you have either a capital letter or an ascender, something that stands above the rest of your word, and then you're left with this imbalance. So with these flourishes, you can pull off that upstroke and fill that space ends. You can see I've done it here with the V first by sweeping right and then really filling it into the left, and I'm at this V up here, just moving the opposite direction first to the left and then to the right. This is a really useful flourish when you are looking to create balance in your piece. Now one thing that's really cool about a few of these letters that end an upstroke says that you can actually use the flourish instead of going next to the letter over the letter. Some of these you can flourish underneath the letter. So for letters that end with a U-shapes, let me show you. With a U-shape as a quick reminder or a V-shape. Letters that end in those shapes, you can actually pull the upstroke below the baseline, below the letter and then start the upstroke which helps you create a flourish underneath the letters. Let me show you what I mean. Let's go ahead and we'll write it in with a letter. That'll help I think. So we've got the letter R here. Now we would normally start to swing up right here with our upstroke. But instead we're going to pull it below the baseline and then add a little flourish. That's what I mean by that. What I show you with the brush panel, you'll really get it. But for now, just know that just for letters that end with a U-shape or the V-shape, you also have an opportunity to fill in space at the bottom with a flourish. Let's look, let's try a few out. So we've got the one we just did with our sweeps to the right then back to the left. You can see at a little hiccup there, let's try it again. Much better and then let's add another turn. Right, left, right a lot of fun. Now with these because you're underneath the word, you usually have quite a bit of space to play around with, so don't get crazy, crazy, but you can create some really lovely flourishes. Again, remember following that basic rule of changing direction and being sure to cross arm as you go. Now that we have tested those outlets, get our brush pen. Let's see what it looks like with some actual letters, shall we? Let's start with the letter N, let's say a word ends with the letter N. Bring it up, over, out, back up. Super fun. I love that. Now let's try the letter V, and this time I'll move to the right. Love it, love it, love it. Now how about the letter I? That flourishes super fun with an I. Let me try it again. You guys are seeing a creative process and I'm going to try it again. I'm going to try to get that little loop right above the I so it would be where the dot would go. See, can I manage it with the pressure on with a camera rolling, can I do it? Needs a lot of practice there. But you can see, you can have a lot of fun with these flourishes now in terms of bringing it low, let's try with the letter R. You'll see here that I'm going to pull my down stroke, but before I sweep it up for the hairline, I'm going to dip it below the surface so I can cover a little bit of space there. Let's cover even more. Love that. Now one thing I want to point out here is you can see that because I'm moving from a down stroke into the flourish, we want to keep the flourish nice and thin. What you're going to do here is the same that you would do is if you didn't have a flourish, you are going to gradually release pressure on that down stroke as you begin to curl into your flourish or into your upstroke there. So you can see it just gradually reduces right around there. So let's try with another letters, I'll start by U. So I've got my down stroke, I'm gradually releasing it and starting my flourish. Those can also fill in space pretty nicely in layouts as you can see I did it with the man here. I pulled that around and so that's another one that really helps fill in some of those blank spaces created by ascenders and descenders of capital letters where you need a little bit of extra space to fill in their. In the next video I'm going to show you flourishes that you can use at the end of down strokes.
7. MODELS: End of Downstrokes: In this video, I'm going to show you flourishes that you can do at the end of downstrokes. These are flourishes that you can do with letters that have a downstroke spine so for example, like a capital B or a capital D, or any letter really where it has a downstroke spine that ends with that square flat bottom so like a lowercase k or an h and I'll show you some examples as we go through these. Now with these, you are going to be starting with the letter, starting with that downstroke and then moving into the flourish. Now, unlike some of the other ones, this one is going to move to the left. It's going to be moving primarily to the left so a downstroke moving to the left, righties, it's going to be tricky you, myself included. This can be one of the tricky flourishes to really master, but I'm not making it hard guys. I'm going to show you what to do. There's probably going to be a little bumps along the way. Like I said, when I do the work that has flourishes like these, I do a lot of warming up, I do a lot of practice and you better believe my recycle bin gets a lot of use when I'm doing this. These are tricky, but you can totally do it. Let's get started. We're first going to try one, which is still a little poll to the left. Pretty basic. Now let's try one with one more turn. Nice. One more turn. Let's try a loop to loop, loving it. Can you hear the concentration, there's not as much talking in this one cause I guess these ones I find very tricky. Let's try one that sweeps a little bit further to the left. Now let's do the same one, but instead of putting it in the middle, let's bring it all the way up to the tippy top there, we'll make it real narrow. That's a good point. You can actually change up the look of these pretty significantly just by changing the size of the loops where it's at, it can give you a totally different look. Even though these are only a few examples, you can tweak these in infinite number of ways, try make them your own and to make them work for your situation. Let's try another one. Let's go back to the shape here, and let's add another turn. I miss that last curl there. You can see I paused, let me try it again. There we go. Better. Let's add a curly Q in there shall we? Let's do curly cause we not. That's a lot on the side but let's do even more. This is like extra, extra, this is like walking in to the house party, decked out in head to toe sequence and a disco ball on your head. This is extra. I'm here for it, so let's try it. Let's see if you follow that. Left, right, left, right, left and then we had a little pause here, we did an additive swash at the. We did a little left right there, 1, 2, 3, 4. 5, 6 turns. That's a lot of turns. These are some of examples, like I said, these are all little bit on the trickier side. Let's go ahead and try it now with our brush pen. Let's make some letters. Let's start with a capital B. Sorry, that's my cat. She's terrible. She's not terrible, she's just loud. You can see how we can use that there. Pretty nice, I like it. Let's try a capital D here. I dig it, very nice. Now, let's try a lowercase letter, let's try an h. You can see the different ways that we can use these. Again, just to like before these swashes that start at the beginning, near the baseline tend to work better honestly, with like the uppercase. But it worked here with the h, you can definitely make it work. Let's say you were making a very fancy high. This is actually cute. This doesn't look like Ohio, but you can see we just got to be really careful with those. Those tend to work a little bit better with those capital letters. In the next lesson, I'm going to be showing you flourishes you can use with the upward loop.
8. MODELS: Upward Loops & C-Curves: Hey everyone. In this section, I'm going to show you some flourishes that you can use for upward loops and letters with a c-curve. You can use these on letters that use an upward loop, for example, like the letter l, b, h, k. But you can also use these on letters that have a c-curve on top. So like an upside down bowl, if you're ready to give somebody a bowl cut. It would look, for example, the C, L, and some Es when you do the rounded E.That's what these are for. With these, you're going to start with the flourish and then work your way into the upward loop stroke or into the c-curve. Let's get started. We're going to start with a pretty simple one. This one, we're going to move from left to right, right into that downward loop. Now we're going to add an extra term to it. Left, right, left, right. Let's add a little d-loop. I like that one, now we can also change it. Let's see what it looks like if we, instead of having this little loop in the middle of our letter or downward loop or a c-curve. Let's see what it will look like if we had it outside. I got two. Again, you can play around not just with the size and shapes but also where they are in relation to each other. All I did was just make this upward loop to the right of that little tiny guy instead of in the middle there. Now sometimes, when I'm doing letters that have an upward loop, I like to get a little crazy and do my upward loop backwards. Let me show you what I mean by that. Let me go ahead and show you what a regular d looks like. We've got a o shape and then we go into our upward loop. But some times and I'm feeling all crazy instead of starting my upward loop going from right and then to the left, I like to start from left down to the right. I'm going to show you, if you'd like to do this with your ds or your whatever letter every now and then, any letter with an upward loop, I'm going to show you a little flourish you can do there. It's much like our first one, only just backwards. We're going to move to the right and then swing up and start that upward loop. Now, if you want, you can also add a little swash to that, to take up a little bit more room. That can be a lot of fun too. Now, just with the letters that used the thin hairline had flourishes that ended on a thin hairline rather, those took up a lot of space. We can actually, use these flourishes to take up a lot of space too. You can see there is not space we could take up here, but I'm going to take it even further and show you some really long flourishes. This one, we're just going to do a simple loop, go right into it, and you can see how that takes up a whole lot of space there. We can make it a not so simple loop, like a little Pretzel. Actually, let's do the Pretzel again. Let's just change where we have that little loop. I like that too. You can see that those take up a lot of space. You can imagine, if you had a word here, like cool, that can take up some of that extra space up there. So now let me show you some mayshetty's flourishes in action with some letters. Let's switch to a new page. Let's try a capital, let's do a k. That's really pretty. Let's try the letter d and we'll use the backwards one here. I'll go ahead, I love that is super pretty. I really like that it reminds me of soak curling up. Would actually be really cute with the little loop there. Very nice, that can be a lot of fun. Let's do another lowercase one. Let's try h. For this one, we're going to pretend, we'll go ahead and draw a word here. Let's say, our word that we're doing is teach. We've got this up here. We want to fill in all of this space before we get to our upward loop. There we go, very nice and that's a fun way that you can do that there. Let's try our super long one here. Going to the letter b there, very nice. Now let me show you what it would look like, if you've got a letter with a c-curve. Let's try a L here. Let's try a c. I got a little wonky there, but you can see how that really adds to it. That one might be a little bit much. Let's try a simpler one here. I like that much better. You remember Jurassic Park he was too busy asking whether we could, we didn't ask whether we should, can I do that? Yes. Should I have? I don't think so. These are letters with the upward loop. So in our next video, I am going to show you flourishes that you can do with the downward loop. See you there.
9. MODELS: Downward Loops: In this video, I'm going to show you flourishes so that you can use with a downward loop. These can be used in any letter that uses a downward loop, like a G, or a J, or a Y. I don't like to play favorites, you know, I don't like to play favorites, but this is my favorite, these are totally my favorite. With these flourishes, they are going to start with the downward loop and then they are going to move with the flourish. You are going to be starting on a down-stroke, and you are going to be releasing that pressure to get that nice thin hairline for your flourish. Let's dive in. Do a simple one first. We'll do our downward loop and then we'll just give it a little extra curl, just a little extra curl in. Since I like that so much, let's give it another extra curl. As you see, they're just my favorite, they're just the best. I love them. Now we're going to do another one where we're going to do the same kind of motion where we're going to swing to the right and then we're going to swing back to the left. Very nice. Now, if you follow me on Instagram, you've taken any of my classes or gotten any work done by me personally, you'll know, I love this flourish. It's one I'm a faves. I think that you would like it too. We're going to do that one again but we're just going to add one more turn onto it. I like that. I like it. I think I probably next time I wouldn't bring this all the way through. Let's let's actually see what that looks like. Yeah, much better. Much, much better. You see, all I did was I just didn't bring it all the way through there. Now, let's see, let's add a little curly cue, you know how I love those curly cues. Woof. Now if you've taken any of my calligraphy classes, you know that I refer to this as the sexy down-stroke. We do sexy Y's, sexy G's here you can go, you can see the sexy Y there. This one can be a ton of fun and just like I said before, you can really change up the look of this by changing the size of those loops. Instead of making it really small, you can make it really big. You just play around with that. Let's try a variation on a theme here. We will do this curve and then we'll go ahead and just swing it back to the right. I dig it, I dig it. Let's go back to our sexy downward loop and we're going to add another loop, this could be too sexy guys, this could be too much. I should probably put NSFW on the screen there, but we'll plow ahead. We've got that loop. Woof, I love it. We got a little boxy there at the bottom. Much better, much, much better. Now, again, the reason I like these so much is because when you're going underneath a word, I think you have the room to play around with. Maybe you don't technically, but it feels like you do. As you playing around with these, just remember, follow those rules. Left, right, left, right, left, right. That's all I did. I just changed directions with each turn, making sure to cross over flourishes whenever I could. All right, let's try a couple more. These are all variations on that theme. So much fun, love, love, love these, and I would love to hear what you think. I hope you love them too. Let me show you some letters that we can use with these. We've done a Y, let's do a G. Again, if you've taken my classes in real life or online, you know that that letter G is my all-time favorite letter, I love it. Let's have some fun with it. Super cute. How about a J. Let's try one of our really long ones here. Let's go to our Y. A lot of fun taken up some space there. Let's try some capital letters. let's try the capital G. Loving it. You can have, so, so much fun with these, and I really, really hope that you do with these. What's up next is we are actually done now with the flourishes based on strokes and I'm going to show you a few little extras that are not attached to letters that you can add to your work. I will see you over there.
10. Standalone Flourishes & Filigree: Now, I'm going to show you a few stand alone, flourishes and Phil-agrees that you can use in your work. We take a look at this example. You'll see that I fill in space where I needed a little bit of extra to create balance, where I did some stand alone flourishes. I created these little loops and curls that can't go around the piece even or not connect anything to give it balance. You can use these within your work, like I did here to create a sense of balance and fill in spaces. You can also use them just like their own little piece of art to add onto it. A lot of times people will do this like if they're doing wedding invitations and writing a name. They like to do a little stand alone flourish or some little pieces of Phil-agree around the words rather to highlight them. I'm just going to show you a few that I like to do. I really enjoy art decor, very inspired by it as I think you'll be able to tell as you look at some of these examples, I also really like Phil-agree. If you look at Phil-agree on my gold, silverware and in jewelry, you can find some really pretty patterns. That's a good place to go for inspiration. In addition, because I find, and myself included when I'm looking for inspiration, sometimes you feel like, "Oh, I have to go look at what other calligraphers are doing or what other hand writers are doing." But you don't, you can find inspiration for this stuff in all places. You can also use the drills that we did. Maybe you have a monogram and you want to highlight it just by adding a little bit of a loopy pattern underneath it. So that it can be really lovely. Now if you want to have some thickness there, what you'll do is you'll turn your paper horizontally so that when you pull the brush toward you, you can have your nice thick down-stroke. I got a little off there, but you see what I mean by that. That an be really fun to highlight a word. You can also just follow the rules that we've learned already with flourishes to create your own. For example, if I'm going to move to the right and then I'm going to want to come back to the left. I'll make it a little loop there. So this resembles some of the flourishes that we've done, but when it's standing on its own alone, it can look really lovely. For example, let's say we had a word over here, we could have this flanking each side of it. That can look really pretty. You can also double up on shapes. For example, just like a long, a little shaky there, let's try again. A long S-curve like this, just add another one. It looks really nice. Maybe you can spice it up by adding some dots, or you can even do some little leaves off of that if you wanted. Some more branches coming out, just be sure that whatever you do on one side, you don't have to do the exact same on the other side. But you do want to maintain a balance there. Then of course, I love hearts. So I like to try to incorporate them when I can. For this one, you can just start out with those little basic loop flourishes and then go into a nice little heart and then back into those little loop flourishes. This is super fun on the top of a wedding invitation. If this was the top, you can just imagine. You can just see how that would look on the top of a little wedding invitation with those below it. Adding it to envelope is really nice too. These are just little extras that you can do and they're infinite. Infinite number of these that you can do. But hopefully this gives you a little inspiration and helps you get started. Our next video, we are going to talk all about how to flourish a whole word. We started with the strokes, we worked over to the letters and now we're getting into words. I will walk you through that process, we will create a piece together and then I will share a little project with you. I hope that all of this has been really helpful. Feel free to go back and re-watch if you need any help and please do download and print out the workbook and that I provided. If you don't have access to a printer, check out your local library, they usually offer free printing and you should be able to get it that way. Otherwise, you can just follow along with this video and I will see you in the next lesson.
11. Laying Out Your Flourished Piece: In this video, I'm going to show you how to take everything we've learned so far and apply it to creating your very own flourished word. You're going to want to have a pencil for this section and an eraser nearby. Because this is going to be very much like sketching, we're not putting down ink yet, we're just trying out a bunch of different things. It's best to have a pencil and eraser. Now, whenever I'm deciding how I'm going to flourish a word, if it's going to be like a standalone piece or something bigger for example, like assign or something like that, I like to do some concept sketches for. Concept sketch is just basically like testing out different directions that we could take the final piece. Now, when I'm scripting, look if I'm writing a letter or addressing envelopes, I don't do this for every single word that I'm about to script. After you've done this several times, you have an idea of where you can add flourishes in the midst of your writing. But for pieces that I wanted to have like some really extra flourish to, I like to lay it out beforehand. You might be able to see here, I've written it out and pencil I will zoom in when we get closer. But I like to write my word out three times. That way, I have to try three different layouts before I decide which one I'm ultimately going to go with. Now, this might seem a little bit like overkill. But, I find that usually in the end, I end up doing a mix of all three. Because when you can try different things, you might say, well, I like what I did here for this one, but the second one I like what I did for this letter. I'm going to incorporate that into my final piece. That's not something that you could have discovered if you had just done one. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here. You've got your pencil. When you take a look at your word, you might notice for this word that I have left off the downward loop here for the y and the crossbar for the t. That's because those are two really big opportunities for flourishing and so I like to save those so that I can see how everything else fits together. Now, you don't have to do that. You can absolutely put those in there and then just script over them as you continue your sketch. One little aside here, I have been reading the discovery of witches book. Discovery of witches. I cannot believe I had never heard of this book until now, it's a trilogy. I'm very excited to get into the other too. But I mentioned that because the words that we're going to be using in this class are related to the book because honestly, it's all I can think about right now. Our first we're in the, we're going to work on is mysterious. When you are deciding how to add flourishes to your peace. Remember, if we go back and we think about the rules and we think about the first one which is balanced, we want to maintain a nice balance here. To maintain a nice balance, it's always a good idea to start in the middle to see if you have any opportunities for flourishing in the middle, you will have to always do that, but it's a good place to start. Lucky for us we do have a T here, which gives us an opportunity to flourish here in the middle. When you're doing crossbar flourishes, these are going to be the same flourishes that you could do with end of up strokes. Because we're starting with that thin hair line. You can use those flourishes for crossbar. We'll start with this right here along like it. Now, we know that we're going to have something underneath here because we've got this y. Let's go ahead and put that, I like that. Now, to add some balance, we're going to need some piece under here at the very least, because this is pretty balanced on top, but It's very heavy to the left on the bottom. Going back to the middle area, seeing what we can add in over here, we've got this R ends in that upstroke, we could pull that down. We have also got the eye that ends and the upstroke. We could pull that down as well. We have the E too, but I've found that they don't work great for the E to pulling it below. It's okay. Like you can make it work, but it's not really my first choice because the shape of the E really needs that final upstroke to make it look like any. I'm going to go ahead and do the R here. I like that. Since this is overlapping, I'm going to move this curves. This is again why we use pencil so that we can make these changes along the way. Let's see, I need a little bit more space here. I'm going to take this you down. Make that a little smaller there. That looking good. Now for the top, I can either extend this all the way over to give it a little bit of balance on the top, or we can go ahead and fill in all this space up here. You know, what I think I'm liking the way that this looks with just that on top, it still has a nice balance. I will try filling in the whole space in the next one. This is another good reason. We can try a couple different ones and see what we like. We started with the t last time. Let's start with the y. Like I said, you don't always have to start in the middle. Now that we know what it can look like balanced and I know for this next one, I want to try to fill in all the empty space around the word. We can go ahead and start with the y. Let's make this one like real loopy. Remember with balance, we're also trying to balance out the negative space that we've created within our flourishes. Let's see with this version will try to make these flourishes nice and tight here. Here we go. Let me try that again. Now, because I'm moving from left to right, I can also use the flourishes that we use for the beginning of an upward loop. I'm going to do that right here. I'm going to add a little curly Q here. There we go. Our little curly pretzel, I like that. Let's see what opportunities do we have to bring to fill in this space up here. We could bring the S up, but we could also bring the U up and you might be thinking, can we didn't do anything, we didn't do any flourishes that start at the beginning of down strokes and that's true. But with a letter U as well as like the letter Y or anything that kind of has that U-shape in it there. We can actually create a little curve on top, which is of course our bowl C curve. We can do the same with color flourishes that we would do with an upward loop here. I'm going to go ahead and create that little C curve up top and I want to do another little loop. Let's see, we do this here. Little tiny loop and there. So I can see what that negative space is going to look like, make sure it's all balanced out. Very good, I like it. We'll bring up the S here too. Since we've got a lot of tight curves will make this one just, we will add it double-loop to that one just to give it a little bit of breathing room. Now, because we've added a little bit extra to the right of the word here, let's add a little bit extra to the left. Like that. Now, we get to fill in this space down here. We're like go into town on this one. Let's see. For this one, let's pull down the I. Add another little double loop in there. Not bad, not bad. We got to fill in just this little space right here. I'm going to pull down the U. You see I go over it a lot of times. Getting back into that drill right where you, there we go. Makes it nice and around. That's why I'm saying this is a sketch period. This is a time for you to refine and test out the shapes and get it exactly how you want it. That one is pretty curly. I actually think that might even be a too tight of a curve right there. We'll just take out that little loop, de-loop. Here we go. Nice. For our last one, let's try something a little bit different. We've tried to having it all of the bottom, a flourish on top. In the center, we've done the flourishes all around. Now, let's try to do flourishes in this corner and over in this corner. Remember if we're thinking about our word as having weight, then as long as the weight is balanced on either side, it will remain in balance there. We will start with our y because we know we want to fill in this space here. We have to have a crossbar. We know we don't want very much of it over here. So I'm just going to do like a little swash there and then let's see, actually want to go the opposite way. You are seeing the creative process in action here. Now I'm going to take that 's' and sweep it up. all right, looking good. I feel like this maybe a little too large and I like the way that these lookup here. There we go. Then I think I will sweep that out, just to take up a little bit more space. Now I feel like we still have a little bit of room here to add some flourish. I'm going to bring the arrow down. I'm not going to take it out to the right very far because we want to keep that balance. Now I need a little bit extra over here. So that's not bad. Then what I will do is I will in the next video I'm going to take these designs my favorite parts of each of these designs, and I'm going to sketch out a new piece and ink it down. Now we can also do that same process not just with a single word, but with phrases and sets of words. Like I said before totally obsessed with a discovery which is book series so I've got Matthew and Diana here. Now if you haven't read the book yet, he's a vampire, she's a witch, it's all just so good. I love it so much. I'm going to walk through with you here that decision-making process that you can go through when you are doing a word or phrase. Now I'm only going to do one, but you know the drill now how you can do all three. We're going to follow this in much the same way that we would just a single word. I'm going to zoom in just a little bit more there. Much that we would do a single word except for that now we've got maybe a couple of different lines to think about, like in this example. We can also see how we can make the words interact with one another, if there is an opportunity to do that. I'm going to go ahead and start up at the top here with Matthew's name and we'll start in the middle. We see that we've got these empty spaces here and here. Because we've got these ascenders. So we're going to want to fill in that space. Now one really cool thing that I'm seeing that we have an opportunity to do is call a ligature. A Ligature is when a part of a letter ends up creating the part of another letter. Which I know sounds a little complicated. For example, what we are going to do here is we're going to cross these Ts with our crossbar. But then we're going to go straight into that upward loop because we have an opportunity to do that here and I think it will look really cool. We'll just do because we're going to be adding this ligature and I don't want it to be really complicated. We will make as a real simple flourish at the end here just a little curl. Then we'll sweep it across, go straight into that upward loop. I like it now we have this little area right here we need to fill in. I'm going to just sweep that W, fill that area in. Now on the bottom line here we have this space that needs to be filled in. So that can either be filled in with the words from Diana or we can fill it in with some of the words from Matthew. Now we do want to keep the words pretty balanced in this case. If you're doing a composition where you want certain words to stand out against others, then you could choose all the flourishing for one word. But we want it to keep it pretty balanced. I'm going to see what we can do with Diana's name before we start to pull in from Matthew. We have some options, we could do a capital D that has like a little bit of flourish coming up. I like that. We'll give that a shot. We can also add a little C curve to the top of our N. I'm not really dig in there what are erasers for? Then we can take our A up. I like that. Make it a little smaller so we don't run into the W in Matthew there. Now we've come out a little wider down here, and if this extended will make this extend out the same distance. We're going to want to do the same up here. Let's do a little simple flourish for the M. Then we'll add a swash at the beginning there just to balance that out so now we've got a little bit of space here. Do a real wide curve, you see here how I worked backwards. Now when I'm ready to lay down ink on this, what I would do is I would start here and then work into the flourish because again this is a C curve appears. This is like one of those flourishes where you start the flourishing you move into the stroke. But one of the great things with our sketching, is that we can work backwards. I know I wanted my ampersand to start right here, so I can work backward from there. Now it's important when you work backwards that you then go back and run the path the correct way to make sure that it's doable. You might find out that it's not quite doable the way I wanted it. Maybe that curve needs to be a little bit wider, a little bit a rounder there. Then we've got some space here to fill in. Ampersands are really great for filling in space because you can extend them or shrink them however you need to. Very good. Now, I've got a little bit of space here. I think what I'm going to do, and we're going to try this, it might not work. You've seen this in real time. We're going to do a down stroke flourish here similar to what we've got for the M. Then we will bring our D up and over it worked. I love it. Now you can see how you can make these work together. Now if you weren't real satisfied with this, you could always do another one. Like I said I always do three, just the rule of threes. Three feels good. You can do more, you can do less. You know what I'm looking at this now? Needs a little heart right. Now it's perfect. Deborah Harkness hit me up for your next book cover. In the next video, I am going to show you how to put down ink all over your newly designed flourished piece. I'll see you there.
12. Inking Your Flourishes: Welcome back. In this video, I am going to show you how to lay down ink in your new flourished design. Now, for this we are going to be using brush pens. As I mentioned before, the best brush pens to use for these are going to be brush pens with a very low flexibility, for when you're starting out. Now as you get better and better and more experience at this, go for those Tombow Dual tips, go for the bristle brushes, but in the beginning when we're still learning to keep that light touch, even through those very long loopy hair lines, it's best to use a pen with a low flexibility. I'm using today the pentel sign brush. If you want something with even less flexibility, you could always use a Crayola marker, like a broad tip Crayola marker, that can be helpful as well. Just a quick refresh on brush calligraphy, remember you want to hold the pen about an inch and a half to two inches up from where the barrel meets the brush. You'll want to have the pen hit the page and about a 45-degree angle, and you want your hand to move pretty smoothly across the page, like the air hockey puck. You went the bulk of the movement to come from that elbow and shoulder, not the wrist and fingers. You will of course move your wrist and fingers, but the big movement should be coming from the elbow and shoulders. Now, one thing that you may notice as you watch here in one little tip that I do have, is that when you do have opportunities where you can put your brush at a higher angle, I recommend that you do it. Now, we keep our pen at 45-degree angle, so that when we apply pressure we get a thick line, but at that same angle when we are not applying any pressure, we get a nice thin line. Well, when we have opportunities, for example, like when we're crossing the t here, and we have those opportunities where we're just doing the flourish, so maybe it's an add-on or something. Then we need to have it in an angle where we can get a thick line, we don't want a thick line, we only want a thin line. In those instances, I will tip my pen up somewhere between 45 and 90. I don't know, I can't do math, I guess like 75, something in the middle there. I hold it up there, guiding it with my shoulders and my elbow, and that helps me get that nice smooth thin line. As you're watching, if you see my hand go up, and you are like, "She's breaking the rules", just know that it's for a good cause, I'm breaking the rules for a good cause. I am going to put on some music and I'm going to script this, and I'm going to keep it real time, because I want you to see exactly how this is done. Sometimes when we speed things up, we speed things up to make it more interesting and entertaining for you, because of course it's boring to sit and watch me write something over and over. But for this, I do think it's important that you see the speed, because during some flourishes I will take it very slow, during others, I whip around. I think it's always helpful to see what it looks like in real time. So no pressure on me, no pressure. I'm going to turn on music and I will see you at the end here. That looks pretty good. We've got a nice balanced flourished piece and you can see that the flourishes are pretty thin hair lines. Now one thing you may have noticed again, another reason I wanted to show you in real time is you saw before I put ink down, I moved my hand all around. That goes back to getting that muscle memory. If I just do like a few laps of the curve, I'm about to take, even just those few laps get me ready to go. If you remember from doing your drills, the first couple you did were a little wonky, and then they started to really get in the flow. Running through the loops a few times with my hand before I let it touch the paper are very helpful for me when I'm creating these flourishes. Remember, you do want to keep a very light touch, and when you have the opportunity to lift your pen a little higher so that there's less likelihood of applying too much pressure, do it. That works especially for the crossbars. You can also do it with the s, if you really slow down and then tilt it up, but maybe hold off on that, maybe you just stick with the crossbars for now and as you practice, see what you can do. I would like you to go ahead and try this out. Your three concept pieces that you made, I want you to start a new sheet of paper and sketch out a complete version in a very light pencil and then script over it. Don't get frustrated here, this is a tricky thing to do. Up strokes are hard enough, hair lines are hard enough, but then why don't we make them very loopy and why? It can be a little bit tricky, but the hardest part is what you've already done and that is creating the layout. You've done the hardest part, the rest of this is just going to come with practice. Go ahead and get started and I'll see you in the next video.
13. BONUS: Flourishing in Silhouettes: I have a little bonus lesson for you. In this little bonus lesson, I'm going to show you a fun layout that you can do with your flourishes. That is flourishing to create shapes, little encasements for your words. With this process, the first thing that you're going to do is draw out your shape. I'm just doing a simple oval here. It might seem like that's boring, you can do any shape. But when it's all done, it'll have a really big impact, because you'll look at it and you're like that's cool, because it's in this nice shape. Now you can try to do this with any shape, but of course, it's going to work better with shapes that are rounded, because the flourishes are round. Now, something like a heart, for example, you can definitely make that work just by ending with the edge of a flourish to give you that fine point at the end. You can try it with all sorts of shapes, that's what makes this really fun. I definitely recommend though starting out with a circle or an oval. Now we're going to do the same process that we did for our word, except we're going to bear in mind that we want to reach the edge here with our flourishes to create the look of the shape. The word that we're going to be doing today is witchy. Like I said, just saw into this book right now. We're going to be doing witchy. I'm adding some flourish to that. We're going to follow the same process looking at our word here, only this time we don't necessarily need to worry about starting in the middle, because we know we're going to be going all the way around here. We're going to start from our W here. I'm going to bring this out and back over like that. Now, let's move on to our next. Let's do a dot t next. Let's see what this looks like. Just like with before, with the words and phrases, definitely try a few. Just for the sake of the video, I'm only going to do one here. But again, normally, I would do many. You guys have seen my big groovy or leaf design, because I'm working on making a mirror of that of that and I have so many different versions of that one in my sketchbook. There's no harm in doing things several times. In fact, that's the way you're going to get the best design. Now let's move on to our y here. I think we can get that. Here we go, nice y there filling some space here. Let's go with our t. Let overlap the y here. Let's bring this out, make it a little wider, will come and overlap this. Fill in that space. Here we go. In that way the flourish isn't too close to the word there. So far, these are looking pretty evenly balanced in negative space, so now we just have to keep that up and balance it out in the positive space as well. Let's see. Now we have to fill in these areas here. There are some more opportunities to pull off the letters, but I think I would like to try some stand alone flourishes here. Let's just do some little loops and see what that looks like. One there. I actually really like this. Here we go. Well, maybe we'll just bring that up to fill in a little bit of that space there. Let's do the same thing over here, because I am really digging this. I like this. Yes. We can see how it looks. It's going to have the look when it's done of an oval. Now, I just sketched like a loose oval here. But if you want it to be very precise, you can always find an object to trace or use a template to trace over. Sometimes when I want a silhouette to be very precise, what I will do is I will print out image of that silhouette. For example, with an oval, I would go to word and create a little oval in their, print it out, and then my sketch on top of it, so I could test that out. Then when I was ready to do the final version, I would trace that oval so that I was very, very precise. You can make it a loose shape like this one or you can make it much more precise. Now, normally what I would do once I got to this version, is I would then transfer over to a new piece of paper and do a very light sketch of this so I could put down in ink. But what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to go ahead and put down ink just like this. Like I said, this is maybe a little too dark of a pencil. It'll erase, but it will be not as easy to erase as like a really light pencils. Again, when you're doing this, I recommend that you actually redo it if the pencil is too dark. I'm looking at this. We need a little space there. See always, you catch new things every time you look at it. I'm going to turn on some music, but I'm going to go ahead and do this in real time so that you can see. Because when we got these extra flourishes, we have an opportunity to move our page around. We don't necessarily need to be in a position to right from left to right. You might see me do that. I want to see it in real time. Here we go. Okay, so you can see that I shifted it around and moved it around and you also see that after I was done, I ended up filling out a little bit more space, adding another curly Q, a little extra flourish and of course, a little spider. As I'm looking at this, I see some space right here that might need to be filled in. Sometimes when you put down an ink, then you get a better look at the final piece and you can see ways maybe to make it a little bit better. I would probably, for the next version, I would go and add this and curl in. Again, this is why it's good to go in with the attitude of, I might have to do this a few times. But the only reason is because there are so many options and you want to come up with the best one. In this time witchy vein, I'm going to show you a piece that I did with flourishes just so you can see that you can flourish this and lots of different shapes, even make a little witch hat. This can be so much fun when it comes to holidays and parties and events. You can create very cool shapes with your flourishes, for example, if you wanted to do a tree for Christmas. You could even do a scene very cool, little Cornucopias for Thanksgiving. If you are not already following the Postman's Knock, go do that now. She does beautifully flourished pieces where she creates different animals and silhouettes just from flourishes. So she's a great person to follow for a little inspiration.
14. Wrap & Class Project: Hooray. You made did it. You did it. You made it through our class. I hope that you learned a lot about flourishing and I hope you feel more confident in your flourishing abilities. Now, for the next steps, what I would like you to do is create a class project. For this project, I want you to script up a word or a phrase in a shape. I'm going to recommend that you start with an oval like we did in our practice, but if you're feeling adventurous, go ahead. I want you to pick a word that is your favorite thing right now. So that can be your favorite food. It can be a word related to your favorite TV show. It can be a word related to your new favorite book, Ola Witchy and A Discovery of Witches. Whatever it is, it should be something that when you look at it, you smile. It makes you smile and it's a word that you're not going to mind spending a little time on, right? Once you have created your project, I would love for you to upload it here in Skillshare in the project section. I want you to share your three concepts sketches, as well as your final piece. Now if you're on Instagram, be sure to share your work on there as well and tag @hooplaletters. I love to look at student work and I love to share student works. So you just might see it pop up on my feed if you do share. I hope you have learned a lot from this class. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to ask in the community section, in the discussion section here rather. Because if you have the question, I'm guessing a lot of other people do too, right? If you post it there, I can answer it and we can all learn together. Thank you again for joining and happy flourishing.
Kimberly Shrack, Modern Calligraphy & Illustration
