Intermediate Brush Calligraphy: Bounce, Flourishes & Composition Techniques

1. Welcome!: Hello, and welcome to my intermediate brush calligraphy course. This is the perfect next step if you've completed my beginners calligraphy course, beginners brush course, or any similar course. As long as you've got the understanding of the basic strokes of how to form the lattice and if you're able to join the lettuce up into short words and phrases, this is where you'll level up your skills. We'll cover so many exciting topics like letter spacing, composition, trying different stars like bounty calligraphy, flourishing. I'll show you how to add, really nice flourishes and drawings to your words. It's going to be a lot of fun. I can't wait to inspire you and share for my own decade long calligraphy Jone. If you're feeling ready and you've got your pen and paper ready, let's get started. 2. Letter Spacing: Today's lesson, we're going to focus on letter spacing. What we're going to do today, we're just going to grab a blank page and we're going to do a few exercises together, and I'll show you some techniques. We'll do some practicing together and hopefully you'll get the ball rolling and you'll just start to understand about spacing a little bit more. You can always use this exercise to keep practicing. We're going to name this lesson letter spacing. There are different types of spacing in calligraphy. You can have a very tight spacing or you can have your letters, very well spaced. You can also have very, very wide spacing. And all of these are going to look different and they will also determine your lettering style. You probably have some sort of style already. So you can start noticing whether naturally you tend to space your lettuce or do you tend to position them very close together, or maybe your spacing is exaggerated. It's just a certain style and it can look really, really good as well. So to achieve tight spacing, we want to focus on the connection stroke. So maybe let's just do lettuce A and B here and just an example. I'll show you what happens to the connection stroke. When you're finishing your first letter, you're going to make this connection stroke to go up and we're not going to stretch it to the side at all. We're just going to have it up as straight up as we can before we connect it to the next letter, which is the letter B, let's say. Okay. Notice how it's pretty much the U shape. These two strokes are almost parallel and the space between them is quite small. If you want to achieve very nice spacing, like a regular spacing, we can slant this connection stroke a bit more to the right and we can stretch it out as well. For example, let's do the letter A again. But this time, instead of going up in a straight line, I'm going to stretch the stroke a little bit more to the right and it creates a nice gap between these lattice. By lengthening and stretching it to the side, you can achieve a bigger gap between your lettuce. If you want to exaggerate our spacing, all we have to do is follow the same technique where we're stretching the stroke. But this time, we're going to try and keep the stroke almost horizontal. We're going to do the letter A, Now this is what I'm doing. I'm going to the side, and then I have a little bit of this horizontal stroke going on here before I connect it to the letter B. Again, I'm just going to stretch this exit stroke to the side, imagining that there's another letter to follow. So if you have a look at all of these gaps, you'll see that they're all different and all we've done, we're just focused on the connection stroke to alter the spacing, to change it. So we're going to do the word sage. We're going to do it three times and we can start with tight, then do well spaced, and then we're going to try and practice wide spacing. We're starting with this one. I'm going to do it about sage and trying to keep my connection strokes very short and try to guide them up as much as I can. So very, very tight. I also want you to try and focus on your entry and exit strokes and just always extending them. It just makes your word look a bit more professional, a bit more complete. I highly recommend starting to practice longer entry and exit strokes. Let's do well spaced. That would be my style, I think. Some people would fall in this category or this, it doesn't really matter. We're just practicing different styles. But you can start noticing what feels more natural to you. Let's do it again, starting with a nice entry stroke. This time I'm going to stretch it out a bit more, just make it easy to read. Now, this I'm picking up my pen after every single letter. Try to do it in your own style. Doesn't have to look like mine. Pick up your pen after every letter. Don't forget to stretch that exit stroke to the side. With wide spacing, we're just going to exaggerate it even more. Letter, stretching it this way, picking up my pen. I'm also making my letters a bit smaller for this style. However far you stretch your strokes, do try to make these gaps fairly similar. Obviously, we're not like robots and we can't make them 100% the same because we're just doing hand lecturing. It's not an actual font. Do try your best to make them consistent, as consistent as you can. If you are going to draw little circles in between your letters, it would all be fairly similarly sized. It's easier than the said, I know, but just thinking about it will help you to do it. Right and notice how I naturally made my word a bit bigger here just because I know that if I'm running out of space, I need to make my lettering a bit tighter and a bit smaller. I naturally just did this word a bit smaller. I usually use this tight technique when, for example, I'm running out of space on my card and I suddenly need to make my lettering a bit tighter to make sure it fits, and it's a bit smaller. Another word. Let's do the word Lilac. I'm going to start here with a nice entry stroke again. So very tight spacing here. It makes your write naturally a bit shorter. It takes less room on your page. So Lilac. Also, if you're struggling with keeping things straight, you can just draw a line just to help you a little bit. It can be a bit hard just lecturing on a blank page like this. We're going to space it a bit better next time. I'm going to stretch these strokes a little bit more like this. Now it's taking more room right away. This last one, we're going to stretch even more and I'm going to keep my lattice shorter and smaller just to make sure that I fit them in here. There's not much room. There we go. We could do another word. Let's do the word Nav maybe starting with the letter N and just stretching it all the way up, picking up my pen dividing each letter just like we did before. I trying to space it a bit better now. My style is very bouncy. Dunbar yours is looking different. Everyone style is different. That's absolutely normal. Let's stretch those strokes or debated the side, trying to keep our lattice fairly small here, but just focusing on those connection strokes. Well, you can see how they all look a little bit different. This is just a nice little exercise. You can keep practicing with different colors, keep lettering different names, do a bit of practicing with this. It's really, really good to try and do it differently. Focus on your connection strokes, focus on the gaps between your letters. So maybe try to do a few more words before you carry on with the next lesson. Well done, everyone. 3. Lettering Size: And just to take this exercise and put it into actual practice and give you a good real life example where you need to use these techniques. What are we going to do? We're going to take a page, any page. We're going to fold it in half. This is just going to be like a little card mock up idea. Imagine that this is a greeting card. If you wanted to, you could also fold it in half once more. Maybe you should actually do that. So let's ford it again so we get this a six size instead. So it's a bit smaller, make it a bit more challenging. Yes, like this. That's perfect. So imagine that we are lettering a birthday card. So we want to let something simple like happy birthday here. And obviously, we have a limited amount of space. We can't just start very big because we might just run out of space. You can, of course, use a pencil to kind of draft your design a little bit. I'm just going to pencil in my lettering here. And just make sure that it's nicely scented, that I'm happy. If I'm not happy, I'm just going to raise it and do it again. Happy birthday. Keeping our lettering fairly small because we don't have that much room here, do we? My dad little heart here like this. I think that looks good. I'm just doing a quick it scribble. I'm not doing any brush lettering or anything. I'm going to go off with my brush and that's where we're going to start to see thick and thin strokes. This is just a really good example. You can see that lettering here is fairly small, so I do need to implement that tight to spacing to make sure it fits on here. I'm going to start my lettering fairly small. And because I don't have a lot of room, I have to try and fit this little phrase on here. So I'm going to work on my spacing. And just make sure that I'm not stretching my connection strokes too wide because that's going to make the whole word look very wide, especially for the word birthday. It's such a long word. You will never think that, but it is a very long word, we want to be very mindful about how long it is because if you run out of room, the card is not going to look very good, is it? We're just being very careful positioning all the letters fairly tightly. M here we go. That's just a very quick example. That's just a little example to show you where we would use tighter spacing, and it's very, very useful to practice. This is not a real card, it's just a little mockup. If it was a real card, we would then erase the pencil lines and make sure you can't really see them. But it is good to use a pencil to draft your design beforehand. I hope this just demonstrates the idea and take your time to do this, try not to rush it. Maybe you need a few attempts and that's absolutely fine, take your time. 4. Bouncy Lettering Style (Individual Letters): This lesson, we're going to practice bouncy lettering style. Bouncing your letters can be so, so nice. It can make your lettering look so much more interesting. You can add a lot of character, and to make it easier for you, I'll just share some very important tips. It's often used in wedding stationery, when lettering place cards, for example, if you want to make them a bit more modern, that's quite a popular style at the moment. For wedding signs as well, for birthday cards, prints, it just makes your phrases and words look very different. And interesting to read. Before we start lecturing actual words, I just want to cover some little techniques. It's all about just learning to bound individual letters. For example, some letters are more popular to bound just because they're made that way and it's just easier to stretch them. It's easier to bring them up or down. If someone asked me, what is the most popular letter to bound, I would definitely says the letter M. So maybe what we can do today, if you have a ruler nearby, grab one for yourself together with a pencil. And we're just going to draw a straight line, it's just going to make things a bit easier. So just a quick little line. It's just going to act as a baseline for us. I'm just going to position my letter M on this line in a very simple style. Let's do this together. Let's just letter the letter M. I'm not stretching my letter below the baseline. I'm just keeping it where it is. When we do a bouncy lettering style, very often we stretch our letters below the baseline. If we wanted to bound this letter M, what we would do, we would stretch usually the second half of the letter below the baseline and then bring it back up with a longer connection stroke. I hope that makes sense. Now this how I positioned this part of the letter a bit higher up and then I did the second part of the letter M even higher before I dropped it down below the baseline and then stretched this stroke all the way up. To connect to the next letter. So there you go. You already have one letter to use in your start. So this letter is very popular as well. It's pretty much in every other word, so you will definitely make a big change to your words. And at the letter, which is also very similar to the letter M is the letter N. So we are going to do it normally again. So positioning it on the baseline, making sure that our strokes are touching this baseline here, and then do a bounty version where we're going to bound the last down stroke, all the way down, and then stretch the exit stroke all the way up. Very simple, classic style, and a bouncy lettering style. Let's try one more letter here, so we're going to do the letter H. Again, we're going to position it on the baseline to begin with. So very nice, tidy and neat. And now we're going to bounce it. So I'm going to stretch its last downstroke, all the way down, and again, come back up. So now to the pattern here. What's happening essentially, we're just taking the last downstroke of each letter, and we are stretching it down. So you can just think of it that way. So a bit of a theory there. So it's all about that last downstroke, and you want to bring it below the baseline when you go down. That's plenty of letters already, but we could add a few more. So let's just do another line. We can literally apply this technique to most of the letters. Let's say the letter A, which maybe doesn't seem like it would be a letter we could bounce, but let's just try and do it normally at first. It's very simple style, and we're going to try and take this last downstroke of the letter and bounce it below this baseline. Let's see what happens. So I'm doing the downstrg going all the way down and then I'm coming back up. Imagining there'll be another letter to connect to. There we go. We could also do the same thing with the letter R. It's not that common to bounce, but it's definitely doable. Here days on the baseline, if we wanted to make it a bit more bouncy, we would go below the baseline and stretch it back up like this. We can also do that with the letter D. Here it is on the baseline to begin with. And we're going to make it a bit more interesting. Take that last downstroke of the letter and bounce it down below the baseline. Okay, so I hope you get the idea. It's all about that last downstroke. Obviously, they don't really make sense when we do them on their own. So let's just try and put this together in the next lesson. 5. Bouncy Lettering Style (Words): So in this lesson, we're going to practice simple and bouncy lettering styles just so we have something to compare to. So we're going to need about five lines here, let's do five to begin with. So grab your pencil, just draw these quick lines. Okay. And we're going to do a simple style on the left and bouncy style on the right. Let's carry on with lettering color names. Let's do the ward silver. I think that's quite a nice w we could bounce. In this first simple style, we're going to try and position all of the letters on the baseline. Notice how I'm positioning them all on this baseline and being very careful and to not go below it. Thinking about spacing here as well. Take it slowly. There we go. A very balanced, simple style. Now I'm going to do the bouncy version and we're going to start with the letter S and straight away, we're going to stylize it and bring it below the baseline, making it fairly big. Then you can pick up your pen here, have a little pause, and then do your letter I a little bit higher up so it doesn't actually touch the baseline at all. It's also a bit smaller. We're going to do the letter L, stretch it up, and I'm going to position it on the baseline. Then do the letter a bit higher up again. The letter E may be a bit lower. When we get to the letter, we're going to do a big bound because that's one of the letters. We can bounce in a very nice way all the way down and now it is how different it looks. We change the size and height of some lettuce, we stretch some of the letters down. Maybe it's not the best example. So words are harder to bounce. But we did use the letter R technique where we stretched it below the baseline and we made the letter S quite stylized as well. Let's do the word marigold. It's quite a long word, so maybe try starting it fairly small. Again, I'm touching the baseline with all of my kind of downward strokes. I'm rounding them up at the bottom here, making them nice and neat. There's no bounce at all here. My spacing was a bit off here, but it doesn't really matter. So now we're just going to transform this word into a bouncy style. And this is a really good example, actually. So we're going to start with the letter M. When we do the second part of the letter M, we're going to stretch down that downstroke and bring it back up. Then we're going to do a small letter A, and I'm going to make the loop, my letter quite nice and big and then stretch it all the way down again below the baseline. Then do the letter I a little bit smaller. Followed by the letter G, which naturally stretches down. Doing the letter O, making the letter L maybe a bit bigger, positioning it on the baseline and doing the letter D kind of up in the air here. But then when doing its last down stroke, I'm going to stretch it all the way down like this and then finish with a nice exit stroke. Okay, so this is a really good example, and you can see how different these two styles look. It's quite amazing, I think. Okay, let's do another word. Let's just letter the word pink, something a bit shorter. Right, so let's do it in a nice and clean style to begin with. Okay, there we go. Then we're going to do the bouncy version. I'm starting by stretching the slope of the letter P maybe a bit below the baseline, just making it a bit bigger, then doing the letter I and we got the letter N coming up and we know that we can use this last downstroke to all the lovely bounds to this word. There we go and do a nice letter K at the end and maybe bound the last stroke of the letter K as well. Always remember to stretch the last stroke to the side as long as you can. Let's do two more words. Let's do the word green. Starting very neat. Do take your time here. It might not work the first time you do it, or maybe you're struggling with this simple style. It's quite hard to do if you're used to bouncing your lettuce. So do take your time. I don't want you to rush here or if you feel like it doesn't look very neat and you want to do these words a few more times, please, please take your time. But it doesn't have to look perfect. Just remember that. We're just practicing here. Right. So doing it in a bouncy style. We're starting with the letter G. And then making a nice big lobe for our letter R, picking up the pen here, having a little pause, and then stretching the last down stroke of the letter R. Then the lettuce E, I'm going to keep fairly small and above the baseline. And to contrast them, I'm just going to exaggerate this letter N and bring it all the way down before finishing with a nice exit stroke like this. Well then, everyone, you're doing a great job. It's not an easy exercise. Let's do the word white just because we have some nice letters in there. Doing the simple style first. Don't forget to pick your pen up from your page from time to time. There we go. So I'm going to do the letter W kind of normally here on the baseline. But then when I do the letter H, I'm not going to position this stroke on the baseline. I'm going to keep it up here, and then use the bounds method where I stretch it all the way down, bring it back up to catch the letter I, again, kind of above the baseline. Do the letter T and finish with the letter E. That's kind of also up in the air. So that could be a nice way of doing it. So I hope you find it useful. I hope you can see the difference between both styles. But notice if you like this style, if the kind of suit your personality, if that's something you want to keep practicing or maybe you're in between of these both styles, somewhere in the middle. That's also fine, or maybe you love this classic looking style. It's also absolutely fine. But this is just a very productive exercise to try. I hope you enjoyed it. Well done, everybody, and I'll see the necklace in. 6. Plan Out Your Phrases In 3 Steps: Now that we've practiced lettering words and joining up letters, we are ready to start putting a few words together into longer phrases. So there's a lot to think about when you're starting to do longer phrases, and I'm going to share as many tips as I can this week to equip you with all the knowledge you need to start lettering beautiful compositions, making beautiful layouts. And as always, we're going to start from the very basics. So in today's lesson, I'll show you how to plan your designs, map out your lettering. So we're going to call this lesson mapping out your lettering. The first thing to do is to pick a phrase you would like to letter. We're going to do something very simple just for the sake of practicing. We're going to start with a three word phrase. I'm just going to write it down. The first step, we have our phrase. We can letter believe in yourself, so it's three words and one of them is very, very short. I'm just going to write it down here, just scribble it really in your normal handwriting. All right. So once we have the phrase, we can start planning it and thinking about it in depth. So the second step I highly recommend taking is to decide how many lines you will have in your phrase. When I say lines, I mean how many words you're going to have on one line and how many lines in total. So we only have three words, and I highly recommend, especially for brush lettering, I highly recommend trying to fit one word on each line if it's a short phrase. So we could do three lines, each word would be on its own line is the most effective way because then you can make your lettering bit bigger rather than lettering it in one line, and will literally take the whole page and you'll have a lot of room at the top and at the bottom of the page and it just won't look as effective, although it has its place and sometimes that might look nice. But if you're using a chunky pen, especially, you want it to pop, you want it to look bold. So I highly recommend whenever you can, try to fit one or two birds on each line. But if it's a longer phrase, obviously, you might need to do three or four. That will really depend. So it's a really, really good place to just think about it and decide how many lines you're going to do. So we're going to write it down here. So how many lines and in this case, we are going to do three. I'm just going to write it down three lines. The third step is to circle the most important words in your phrase. We're going to focus on something that's called hierarchy in graphic design in particular. That's when we are trying to make certain words bigger, your attention is drawn to them and make the phrase a bit more contrasting by making less important words a bit smaller and the most important words bigger. Because it's a very, very short phrase. It's quite hard to do. But in longer phrases, the rule I go by is only keep the ones that are necessary to understand the phrase. So in this case, if I remove the word in, believe yourself, you know, that's just like a different phrase, so it doesn't really work. If I remove the word, believe, it just says in yourself. So in this case, to be honest, all of the words are very important. However, the word in acts as a little fill up word, but I like to call little words like that or a or in or off. Or would always be a little filler bad, so we don't really want to make them too big. So in this case, I'm just going to circle these two bids because I want to make them bigger. So I would say, even the bird yourself wants to be the biggest word. So I'm just going to circle it because it wants to draw attention to the word yourself because you're trying to motivate yourself with this phrase. I would say that's the most important word. So do take a bit of time trying to pinpoint these things, try to think of hierarchy in your design. So hierarchy, circle. Important words. Right, so these are three, really, really huge steps already. So number one, decide what you want to let up. That can be really hard in itself. Number two, how many lines you're planning to have in your phrase in your design. Number three, think about hierarchy. Which words need to stand out in your phrase and which words can be a little bit smaller. 7. Mapping Out Lettering: The reason I called this lesson mapping out your phrases is because I highly recommend drawing a little map, literally, a little map that will act as a little guide and will just help you to make your lettering look a bit more consistent and you'll have some guidelines to follow, which is always always very helpful. If you're lettering a poster or a greeting card, the next step would be to find a center line, find the middle of the page. I'm not going to worry too much right now because I'm not doing any projects. I just have this random space, really. We're going to do a proper project in the next lesson. But for now, just grab a ruler and a pencil and draw a vertical line. This would be a good place to start. Just a straight vertical line. Do try to position it in the middle of the page, but we're not going to do any measuring right now. So just a straight line like this. Ideally, if this was a greeting card or a poster, we're going to talk about this very soon. You would measure the width of your page and you would divide it by two, that number would be the length you need to measure from the side. To get your center of the page. But for now, we're just going to do this approximate line and imagine that this is a center. We can write down actually number four would be to find the middle of the page. This is where we're going to start and draw some lines, which we'll then use as guidelines to position our brush lettering on. We know that we're going to have three lines in our phrase, and we know that two of these lines are fairly long and then we have a very short line here for the word in. So I'm going to do the fast line. And what I highly recommend doing just to make it a bit more balanced, try to have the same length of the line on both sides from your center line. So if you're going to do 4 centimeters here, you then want to do 4 centimeters on the other side as well. So just try to make these lines the same, and then you have a cross line going right through the middle of this line. This is 8 centimeters and we divide it by two. So each side is 4 centimeters. Maybe you're using inches, which is also fine. Just make sure that both of these lines are the same. Right. I've done my first line. I'm going to leave a little gap because we know that when we do lecturing, we need a lot of space at the top of the line. However, the next word is very, very short. I just do 1 centimeter on each side. I left a little gap. You do want to position your lines fairly close together, but not too tight. But the most important thing is not to leave huge gaps in between. So closer is better than further apart. We always want our phrases to be compact. So it looks like all the words are merged together instead of having big gaps in between. You're just going to make your phrase look a bit more coherent. It definitely helps with making your design aesthetically pleasing, nice to look at. Right, so we have another word to divide yourself, and I know that I want to make it a bit bigger. It's a very similar length word to divide belief. I think I'm just going to make this next line as long as this one, as the first one. But I'm going to leave a bigger gap in between because I know that I'm going to make this word a little bit bigger. I'm going to do 8 centimeters again. There we go. You see that there's a bigger gap in between. So there we go. We have a little map for our phrase here, and the next step I highly recommend doing is just using your pencil to very lightly scribble your lettering. So just do a little draft because then you can erase it, you can correct it before you go over with a brush pen. So I'm going to do the first word belief on this line. If you want it to be super precise, and this is not necessary. But if you consider yourself to be a perfectionist, then you like very neat kind of perfect looking designs, you want everything to look super balanced, which again, is not necessary in brush lecturing because it's a handmade skill. But if you really want it to, you could then count the letters in your word and find the middle of your word. In the word believe, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, Lettue. If I take tree from one side and tree from another side, then the letter I falls right in the middle. So I will try and position my letter I right on the center line. Then I'll do B, E and L. The letter is right in the middle and the rest so E, E. So we got the word believe. Okay. So it's kind of fairly scented. We got the word in and we're going to do one letter on one side, do a connection stroke, and do the second letter on another side, and again, kind of splitting these letters so they look scented. And the word yourself, I'm going to do quite big and we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight letters in total. I'm going to do four on one side and four on another side. Obviously, just approximately, this is just for guidance and you don't have to be super super precise. I'm starting here. And making this word bigger as planned. So here we go. We have three words here. I'm fairly happy, I think, with the whole design. I don't think I'm fully happy with this part. So use your eraser if you need to correct anything before you go over with the brush pen, now's the time. I might just make this connection stroke a bit more natural looking and and make it this way. I might make this entry stroke a bit longer. I just balances out a little bit more. I think this looks fairly good. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. The next thing to do is just to go over with your brush pen, follow the pencil lines. Take your time here. Should be quite straightforward. It's really nice when you have something to follow, some guidelines. From here, just try to focus on brush lettering in itself, thinking about the pressure changes. Adding a bit of bounce if you want to, you have a nice baseline here so you can work with it, maybe stretch some letters below. Now I'm stretching this connection stroke to make my word a little bit wider, having a bigger space in between. Let's do the last word. Try to start each word with a nice entry stroke and finish each word with a longer stroke at the end. Obviously, you can go over your guidelines a little bit. It doesn't have to be ideal here. So here we go and just make sure that this is completely dry. Sometimes it might take a few seconds to dry before you get rid of these guidelines. So just use your eraser to get rid of them. There are some bad erasers that might smudge your lettering or they just might smudge your pencil and leave a black mark. So do try to invest in nice erases if you can. I know that some cheap ones sometimes at the back of your pencil can be quite harsh on paper. And once the guidelines are gone, you're going to be left with a lovely balanced design. It's perfectly aligned. It looks really balanced. This is definitely a technique you can use just to give you a bit more confident, give you some guidelines. I hope you enjoy this planning process that is fairly clear and you can do this yourself with any phrase. I highly recommend starting with shorter phrases. Maybe try to pick a phrase, try doing it again. If you have a bit of room left on your page, that'll be a really, really good exercise. 8. Project Mock-Up Example: So in this next lesson, what are we going to do? We're going to take a page, that's A four, just like a regular page and fold it into half. So we just want a smaller page. It's a bit easier to work with at the beginning. So you can also imagine that it's a grating card. It kind of looks like an A five sized grating card. So we had a four. Folded this into half, and we have a five now. Here we go a little card. So we're going to put what we covered in the previous lesson into practice and imagine that we are lettering a greeting card. So the first thing to do, I'm just going to use the other side of this page is to pick the phrase week in letter. And I'm just thinking something really simple again, something fairly short. Let's do something like have a lovely day. So it could be a nice little card. Have a lovely day. Okay. We're going to think about how many lines we're going to have here. So what do you think? I think we could easily break it down into one, two, three, four lines because, you know, we have quite a lot of room here to work with. So we're going to have four lines. You can also do three, of course, but this is just guidance. Four lines, so we've determined how many lines we're going to have. And in the next step, remember, we're going to circle. The most important words. So I would say that in this phrase, the most important words we want to kind of draw attention to are the words, lovely day. The word A is probably going to be quite small. Again, it's a little filler word. The word have I mean, sure, it's probably quite important, but I wouldn't make it as big as these two, but it's also a very important word because without it, the car would just say, a lovely day, so it's not very personal, is it? So here we go, have lovely day. All right. So next thing we're going to do. Remember we're going to measure the width of this card. So mine is 14.8 centimeters. So I'm going to take this number. Divided by two. If you're using the same, a five card, yours going to be the same. And we're getting 7.4 centimeters. You can also work in inches if that's easier for you. So 7.4 is going to be somewhere here. Okay, so that's my center line. So that's the one. I'm going to draw here. So very lightly, try to go as lightly as you can with your pencil because, remember, we will be erasing these lines. Another really useful thing to do is to find a center line kind of looking at the height of your card, so we could also measure the height. In this case, it's 20 1 centimeter. If I divide it by two, I get 10.5 and I did it already here. That was very lucky. So I'm just going to draw a line here that kind of shows me the proper center of the card. So this is right in the middle here, okay? So if we have four lines, we would probably try and position two lines here on the top, and then two lines here a bit lower down. That would be a thing to do. The thing is, we don't really want to fill in our card with, like, big, big lettering without leaving any negative space. In graphic design, in particular, this is when I did my BA studies and I really remember this so well that we were always taught to leave negative space in the background because you know that you also want to show that negative space, which is as important as your design itself. I would say that I probably want my lecturing to be this big. Maybe start somewhere here and end somewhere here. Again, we need to do a bit more measuring if we want it to be nicely scented. So what I usually like to do, I like to pick a number, so maybe in this case, we could do 5 centimeters. And I'm just going to mark 5 centimeters here, and then 5 centimeters from the bottom. And then maybe do 3 centimeters from the sides. So I'm just going to get rid of some of the lines here. Otherwise, it's going to become a bit overwhelming. So here we go. So I know that I can't go over these lines. So these will be like my little borders. You can also just do a really light square if that's, you know, helping you at all. So my lettering will be within these guidelines. It might look quite small, but you'll have lovely space in the background. Also if you ever wanted to add some drawings there or maybe some watercolor elements or just literally hearts or little stars that could nicely complement your lettering, you could because you would have room for that. From here, I'm just going to draw two lines. So we have the word half and then A, so it's a very short word, kind of here. I'm going to write it as I go. I think that's a bit easier. So again, two letters on one side, two letters on another side, try to make it balanced. The word A is going to be right in the middle here. Then I'm going to position the word lovely on this center line and make it fairly big. And the word A kind of here, see where it fits for you. So for me, it's a bit lower down here. So I'm going to make it fairly big again, but because it's quite a short word, and the letter A is like in the middle of the word, so I'm going to try to position the letter A on this center line. Now, it can sound a bit, confusing. Trust me, once you got through this a few times, it's going to become so much easier. I'm adding a bit of bounce. I might add a little entry stroke. To my letter days, it looks a bit more balanced this way. You can also use your eraser, just, you know, correct a few things if you're not fully happy. I might make this exit stroke a bit shorter. So, here we are. Let's see what happens when we fill this in with lettering. Okay, so give it a few seconds so it dries before you start erasing your guidelines. Right. So I think I've gotten rid of all of them. And if we look at this, we can see that we have a really nicely centered design, which is not overwhelming. It's not like huge. If you wanted to, you can add something in the background. You can make it slightly bigger if you wanted to, but just always remember, I highly, highly recommend always leaving some negative space in the background. And then if you want to, of course, you can grab another pen or just some markers you might have at home, and even adding something simple to your card like little hearts can look so lovely, but it can also look very overwhelming if your lettering is very big already. So having a lot of negative space is especially useful if you want to add some background elements. This really, really simple heart I'm doing with my Tambo brush pen in this pink color can be so, so effective. It doesn't really have to be anything, you know, crazy. You don't have to learn, have to draw or anything. You can just use some simple elements like that. I hope this demonstrates the point. If this feels really overwhelming, I don't blame you. That's absolutely fine. You know, it sounds a bit scary that you need to measure things and divide things. You know. There's a little bit of mat involved in here. But trust me, the more you do it, the more natural you'll feel, I promise. I just remembering the simple steps following them. And after a bit of practice, you'll start to do these things naturally. I would rarely do this, I would rarely measure it out unless it was something very important. After practicing this way for even just a few months, I was able to kind of eyeball it to the point where it would still look fairly scented if I didn't use any guidelines, but if I just use the pencil to trace my design and just edit a little bit that way without doing scent lines and all that or just drawing individual lines. But that's a really, really good and proper place to start. So I hope you enjoyed learning a bit of a theory behind it all, and there are a few little things I want to cover, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Different Examples Of Aligning Your Lettering: And there's another important topic I want to cover this week and they're going to talk about lettering alignment. Aligning your lettering. I'll show you three different ways and all of them can look really, really nice on your greeting cards or on your posters. It's really nice, especially if you want to make your design look a bit more interesting, a bit more different. I'm just drawing some lines so we have something to letter on. All right. Let's do a phrase, thank you. So you could align your lettering to the left so left aligned left alignment. And that would mean that we're making sure that the next word would start where the first one started. So both of these lines would be aligned to this corner. You could also just draw a line there to make it a bit more clear. So I'm starting my next word from here. Like this. This can look interesting. It doesn't look scented, obviously because it's not, but it definitely has its place. Especially if it's a longer phrase, it can look very minimalistic if you just have a short phrase in the middle of the page and all the words are aligned to one side. We can have lettering nicely aligned nicely scented. That's something we've practiced already, so we would position the next word right in the middle of the first word. So try to align it in such way that both of these wires kind of go through a center line and they're even on both sides. So try to do it free hand here. Obviously, it's not perfect, but you get the idea. So in this case, we would have a center line go through, and both sides would be aligned that way. And we can also align to the right. In this case, we will do the first word and we would align the second word to this line. We would want to finish it here. That means I need to start it a bit more to the right. Leaving a little gap here at the beginning, making sure my exit stroke is touching this line. Just try to remember there are different ways of aligning your lettering. It doesn't always have to be scented. I can actually look really nice when it's aligned to one side. 10. Lettering On Shapes: The last thing I want to cover is lettering on shapes. So this could be a very, very good exercise. So remember how we were drawing lines to position our lettering on. You can also do little arcs like this or little circles or like a wavy line or anything else. Just remember, it doesn't always have to be a straight line. So we could maybe try. Let's just do the word hello. So this is how we do it on a straight line. So something we're used to. Let's say we wanted to position it on this arched line. What we would do, we would try to make sure that each downstroke touches this line and then it follows its direction. Notice how I'm making my lettering. Quite curved here because I'm following this line, you can also move your page to make it a bit easier. Idea is to make it look like it's baseline is curved. That's what we're going for. So try practicing it. It can be a lot of fun. We have something extreme here like this line, what I'm going to do again, just make it sit on this line, which means when I'm finishing my letter or starting the next one, I'm going to be guided by this line and that will determine where the base of my lettering is. Now it is I'm bouncing it to fit this wavy line. This is quite extreme. We probably rarely use this, but it can be a lot of fun. If you erase these lines, you'll see that your lettering just looks quite interesting. The best thing about this is that you can use this technique when you're drawing your maps for lecturing. Let's just quickly do another short phrase. I'm just going to do my center line just so I have it here. We can do the phrase Let's Have an adventure. I'm going to do the word let's here. I'm making this 4 centimeters. And then I'm going to make the next line 6 centimeters. It's a bit longer, so that's for the word half. And then a very short, maybe two centimeter line for the word A. Let's have A, and for the word adventure, I'm going to do this little arch line. It's really hard to do free hand and make it look straight. So try your best to kind of Make it as straight looking as you can. We're not going to do actual lettering on this. I just want to show you an example. We could have our word let's here. Just draw a quick little map so you understand what I mean. Then we would do the word have and the word and then the word adventure you could position on here. I would just look a bit more interesting. You can just practice with a pencil. It's pretty much as good as doing it with a brush pen because you're just learning to align your lecturing. Doing this, even if you're not using a brush pen can be very, very beneficial. And I've done my wild adventure here because I think it was a little bit too far to the right here, just looked a bit misbalanced. I've added a little entry stroke to kind of balance both sides out a little bit more, and this is something you can definitely do. And this is something we're going to talk about a little bit more on Sunday, but I thought I would just show you that's a really, really good example. So you can stretch your entry or exit strokes to balance out your phrases. Just leave it there. There's something to think about and I think you've got plenty to practice this week. It's a bit theoretical, but that's good because you will learn a proper way and then you can choose whether you want to use this or not or whether you feel like just doing it freehand and feeling it or if you want to do it properly, you will know how and when it comes to it, when you have an important project, you can confidently plan out your design before you do it with an actual pen. I hope this makes sense. Well done, guys, I'm so proud of you all, and I'll see you all on Sunday. 11. 5 Prompts To Help You Define Your Style: This last lesson, we're going to talk about your lettering style in particular. Everybody has a style. There are no two people who can letter in the same way. Similar to your handwriting. Your style is unique and special. There are no two styles alike. They can be similar and they can share some similar characteristics, but it will be quite hard to copy. Somebody's style. The same applies to calligraphy. You will see some certain characteristics in your style. Maybe your letters are a bit more round, maybe your phrases are a bit more narrow, your spacing is a bit more tight. Or is the exact opposite. Maybe your spacing is very wide and your connection strokes are quite edgy. You do have some style already. But in this lesson, I'm going to try and guide you some simple questions that will help you to recognize those stylistic features, maybe embrace them, maybe start using them more, or maybe discard some of the stylistic features to clarify your style a little bit more. We're going to call this lesson, finding your style. So I'll just give you a few prompts to think about. The first one is going to be about your crosslines on the letters like the letter for example, and the ascenda shapes. What I mean by that? Let's say you're doing the letter You could do your letter T like this and do the cross line that's just straight and simple or you could do your crossline in a very starlized way. That would be one of the ways of doing it. You can even flourish it a little bit more. Another example could be that you do your letter D like this where you do your ascender stroke without a loop or you could do it like this where you do add a little loop on your shape here. This is what we've practiced before, but some people prefer a very neat, very simple style. I'll give you the last example. If you do your letter P, for example, you could start with a little entry stroke like this. Still keeping it fairly simple or you could add a little loop at the beginning of your letter. Again, do you like looping your letters or do you like keeping them simple? I want you to maybe add a little tick or a little star. Just to mark which style you prefer better off from these two options. Starting out whether it says something about your own style. Maybe you're leaning towards a more of a simplistic style, or you actually like adding little loops and stylizing your letters a little bit more. Maybe make a few notes here answering these two questions. Another thing to think about is your connection strokes. Notice if you're connecting your strokes with the U shape which is fairly round, or if you tend to do a bit of this where your connection stroke is a bit more edgy. Just to give you an example, we could do the letter A like this where the connection stroke is very round at the bottom, and then we adding another letter, for example, here. Or you could do your connection stroke like this where you do the first part of the letter A and then you make it very bouncy, very edgy. You definitely see there's a bit of an angle going on here, and then you do your next letter there. If you do prefer this edgy style, you will also see that in your C shapes because you can do your C shape like this, which is very soft, very round looking, but you can also do your C shape like this, which is a bit more narrow, a bit thinner in general. The next question I would like you to answer here is whether you prefer to round up your C shapes and your connection strokes or whether you prefer having them a bit more edgy. Simple or stylized will be the first thing to think about and here whether you like it round or edgy, maybe try to circle the one that applies to you. Maybe that's not something you actually like, you're noticing a lot of it in your style. Sometimes those stylistic features will appear out of nowhere subconsciously. When you're not trying to do that, it just happenings and noticing that and embracing it is really important. Let's do the third question. Whether you like starting each word with an entry stroke and the exit stroke. As I mentioned this many times in the course already, it is quite important to start your word properly with a nice entry stroke and finish it with a nice exit stroke, but you can do them in different ways. Maybe your entry stroke looks something like this. Or maybe your entry stroke looks a bit more like this or maybe you'll love to flourish your lettuce. This is something we're going to talk about next week, but maybe your entry strokes are a bit flourished. Or maybe you just don't like entry strokes at all and you prefer starting your word or lettuce in a very neat way like this, which is also fine. Try to maybe notice and describe your entry strokes. Describe entry strokes to just give you, again, a bit more guidance whether you're leaning towards a simplistic style or more of a stylized and flourished style. Let's move on to number four. This is going to be a simple one. In this course so far, we've used a thicker brush and a thinner brush. I want you to try and think whether you prefer the thin lettering style or whether you prefer using the thicker brush. I'm just using a nice pink color here. Personally, I think I used to love thicker lettering. But I think these days, I love the thinner style because I feel like it can be applied to more projects in a way. I personally use thinner much more. But do try to decide whether you prefer thin or thick. Lettering style. Number five, I would encourage you to think about your loops in your letters, and this is going to apply to the send the letters the most. We could do the letter G like this where we're really exaggerating that loop, making it very wide, or we can do the letter G like this where we're keeping the stroke very narrow and both are correct. This is just one of the things you can start noticing. Let's maybe try another letter. Let's do the letter. Let's do the letter J. Again, you can exaggerate that loop or you can keep it very thin and very narrow. Also look at your letter S because there's also a loop in there. I love making my letters like this, nice and stylized. Some people prefer having a very thin letter S. Just think about the size of the loops, size of the loops and notice whether you like them to be wide or narrow. These are just a few prompts you could start using to describe your lecturing style. After you've answered all these five questions, I want you to letter the word brave applying these stylistic features. I'm going to do this in my own style. Try not to copy, do try to think about your own style. But just to show you I'm taking into account all of these things we've talked about here. You can see that I do love to add little loops on my Acanda lettuce. That's something we talked about here. I do loop my lettuce quite a lot. Although I did not add any loop here on the letter V and I could have, I could have added a little loop here. I think mine is somewhere in the middle, if we consider the fast point. The second point, my connection strokes are definitely a bit more edgy than round. Number three, I do love these type of entry strokes like the ones that are horizontal. I just love the way they look. Number four, I think I already answered, I do prefer a thinner style these days. Number five, I do love my loops to be bigger. So you can see here on my letter B, this is quite big and round. Here we go. I hope this is helpful and maybe you're feeling a bit more clear about your own style and just know that it will be forever changing. It doesn't mean that if this is how it is now, this is going to be like this forever. My style is constantly changing and it has evolved so much and it's just nice to check in with yourself from time to time and maybe go through this points again or add some other points just so you feel confident that you know what your lettering style looks like. I hope that this has been helpful and I'll see you in the next exercise. 12. Style Inspiration: So far in this course, we practiced bouncy lettering style where we're bouncing our letters below the baseline. We practice spacing our letters, which just made them look a bit wider, wads turned into this very simplistic lettering style. We also practiced lettering on a baseline. Making our letters very round and it just achieved this very soft looking, classic looking lettering style. Whilst we are going to practice some aspect of the styles a bit more, I wanted to do this session, having a few minutes to try and inspire you to show you some easy little techniques. You can art your lettering to enhance your style. First of all, remember, I know that we've only been lecturing with black pens in this course. I'm not telling you that you have to invest a lot into different color pens. But just know that you can use different colors. Your color choice could be something that defines your lecturing style as well. For example, when I first started my Etsy shop, I was doing all of my cards in black, chunky lecturing and that was my brand. That was my stylistic feature. I know another lecturer who uses pink in all of her designs. At least one word would be in pink color, and that's just her branding. That's her design. I also had a face when I was just lecturing in tree colors, and it was black, pale pink, and pale blue. That was my color scheme, and that was defining my lecturing style. I just want you to know that your color choices can definitely define your style. It can bring something very special to your lettering style. I can make it easy to recognize because what is your own style? It's something that people can look at. Imagine scrolling through Instagram. As soon as they see your picture, they know that it's yours, they don't have to see your name to know that it's done by you. And it can show in different ways and color is one of those ways. Just remember this point and do a bit of experimenting with different colors. Even if you just have one different color pen, just try bringing in a little bit of color to your designs. Another thing to think about is using different type of pens and even fine tip pens. For example, you could do a phrase like this. I'm just using a fine tip of my Tambo brush pen, then I'm grabbing my fine tip pen and just doing brush lettering below it. What I'm doing, I'm just combining two lettering stars together and it's making my phrase a bit more interesting. This is such a good technique. You could also do the word sunshine in yellow, for example, to demonstrate the point of the phrase a little bit more. You can also maybe add some golden sun rays around it. Adding these little touches to your lecturing can make such a huge difference and define you as a lecturing artist having your own style. Then also do the same phrase in your normal handwriting, but stylizing it. You could do something like this. I thought the sally brush like. But it's actually a really good way to practice your bouncy lettering style. Using your fine tip pen can be very helpful. Doing this will also help you with the flow of your lecturing. I highly recommend practicing with a fine tip and just maybe lettering a few phrases. Once you get comfortable with this style, you could blend in maybe one or two words in your phrase sometimes. If you wanted to embellish it, if you wanted to make some certain words look different, this would especially apply to those more important words we already talked about in previous week. Making those most important words not only bigger, you can also change their color, you can change the style of the word. There are a lot of different things you can do. Some people like combining thick and thin lettering together. These two pens, it's not my cup of tea, but if that's something you want to do, don't feel like you can't could be another stylistic feature. But if you wanted to make your phrase look more interesting, I would definitely say that adding a little bit of color is probably one of the easiest things you can do to add a bit more style to it. That's definitely something to consider. Don't forget you can always add some embellishments in the background, little snowflakes or hearts. Those things always look so good. Maybe if you are up to doing a bit of drawing, this could also define your style stylistically. I'm just trying a lot of things here, giving you something to think about and hopefully inspire you as well. You can also try to think of aligning your lecturing in a certain way. For example, have this print on EtS that says, you're capable of amazing things and it's all just aligned to the left and it's in the middle of the page. I just looks really simple and pretty. Remember when we talked about lettering alignment, maybe you want to align your phrase to one side and that could also be a stylistic choice. There are a lot of things to think about different lettering styles, using your fine tip to blend in different styles, even just like block capitals or your natural handwriting, using color and different background elements and aligning your words in a certain way can be a game changer. Do try to think of these little aspects and see if you want to incorporate them into your own designs. 13. Lettering Style Examples & Tips: In this lesson, we're going to practice three different lettering stars. We're going to letter five words and we're going to position our paper horizontally like this. To make it all look fairly balanced aligned, I'm going to use a ruler and just draw five lines here, just across my page like this. We got one, two, three, four, five, making sure you leave a little bit of room at the bottom here below your line. Okay. There we go. We going to name this lesson lettering styles. And you're going to do three styles, bouncy is going to go in the middle here. Simple is going to go here and well spaced, we might need a bit more room for this one, is going to go here. On the right. We're going to use our fine tip pen and I'm just going to guide you through each style and we're going to practice them all. Again, try to think what feels best for you, which star you're leaning towards to. Maybe it's a combination of a few of these stars, which is also fine. Just try to notice what is it that you like or dislike. We're going to do the word rainbow to begin with. We're starting with a very simple style. Remember, it means that we're balancing all of the letters on this baseline. Trying to make our connection strokes fairly round. Remember to pick up your pen often. We've practiced a little bit of this already, so hopefully it's fairly familiar. The red rainbow. Let's do the bouncy version of this. We're going to bounce the letter below the baseline. Position the letter A a little bit higher up, then bounce the letter A again below the baseline. Do the letter I a bit higher up, bounce the letter N. That's why I picked this word. It's good to bounce. Do the letter B on the baseline. Let O also fairly neutral. Maybe the letter W slightly higher up. Let's do the well spaced one. We're going to start with a nice entry stroke. I'm still bouncing my letters, but here, it's more about just having longer connection strokes. And stretching those connection strokes to the side. It's a really lovely style. I know a lot of letters actually use this style. Also remember that they're practicing flourishing next week. You can always embellish these three styles with flourishing. Let's do the word ginger because again, just because it has lovely letters in it. We're going to start this word here on the baseline in a simple style, starting my letter G, balancing it on this baseline. Thinking about my spacing, trying to make my connections look like little U shapes. Nice and round at the bottom. Still finishing with a long exit stroke. Now, let's add a bit of bound to this. Doing the letter G, you're going to bounce the letter N as our fast letter, going all the way down, then doing the lectuG a little bit higher. Letter E small and up in the air, and then the letter, nice big loop and bouncing it all the way down. Okay. Then let's do this well spaced style. Starting with a nice entry stroke, it's good to practice these different styles. Of course, there are more styles. But I think these trick feature some really nice stylistic elements. Um that you either do or don't apply to your lettering, I think. It's nice to try all of these different things. Nice entry and exit stroke, very well spaced, making some of the letter smaller, still adding a bit of bounds. There we go. Looks very different. All of these three look very different. Let's do the word heart. Again, it's a lovely word letter. We start with the letter H. There we go. I finished the fast letter, picked up my pen. Rounding those letters up, try to make them extra round here. Let's do the bouncy version. Nice big bounce for the letter H, little letter E. We have the letter coming up, so that's a lovely one to bounce as well. All the way down, back up. Letter T maybe a bit higher up and make a good use of this cross line making it nice and big see if you like that. Maybe you like keeping your cross line fairly just straight across. Let's space it out a bit more. Nice entry stroke. Small letters. Try to think wide here. That's what we're trying to do. Imagine that you're doing this to your lettering. You're scratching it from the top and the bottom and you're stretching it, so it becomes a bit wider. And a nice exit stroke. Finishing my stroke and then very suddenly I'm doing this horizontal stroke to finish it off like this. Let's do two more words. Let's do the word jumper. Just trying to use different letters and some random words. The word jumper resting all the letters on the baseline. I not my best word. I accidentally made my letter P a bit too high, but that's fine. We can always do it again to correct. Let's do the bouncy version. We have the letter U, which we can bounce down. It's just a really good letter to bounce as we already learned of the previous lessons. Let's do the letter M, which is also a very good letter to apply bouncy style to and the letter, nice big loop and bouncing it below the baseline. There we go. And let's to a very well spaced barging. We've done a very similar exercise before, but we were thinking about a different aspect of lecturing. This time we're purely focusing on your own style. Do try to take away as much as you can from it. And the last why we're going to letter together is the word sum up just because there's double M in there. I really want to practice those two letters together with you. We're going to start with the letter S. There we go. You can tell that this is definitely not my style. Sometimes I do struggle to letter in this simplistic style, but I always think it's such a good challenge. See what it feels like for you. Next, I'm going to stylize my letter, start this word with a nice loop, a noise down stroke to my letter U as I bounce this letter down and we have a lovely double M, so I'm going to use both of these letters to add a bit of bound to my word, followed by a smaller letter E and a very big point of bouncy letter R. Let's spread it out a bit more and lengthen those connection strokes. There we go. Always finish this style with a longer stroke at the end. Here we go. A lot of practicing here while done. This is just a really good exercise after you finish this, I want you to go around and pinpoint what is it that you like about it here? It's not only confidence boosting for you, but also you'll start to notice some similarities, some repeated things that you like. So I think just making that decision can be part of it. So once you decide that maybe you like long entry strokes subconsciously, you start doing that more. So it's telling yourself that you prefer this or you don't like that, and then you'll start avoiding it or using it more. I hope that makes sense. Try to think about this exercise a bit in depth, and I'm going to see on Sunday we're going to do some lovely practicing together, just covering a few more details about helping you to find your own style. Well, then everybody and I season, 14. Warming Up For Flourishing: Flourishing is definitely something you want to ease into. In this first lesson, that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to try and get our pen into right position, try to relax our grip, try to relax our hand, try to get into that flow, and I'll share one very, very important tip when it comes to flourishing. As you can see, I'm holding a pencil, so we're not going to be using a brush pen just yet. We just want our hands to get used to these flourishing movements. Grab a blank page, grab a pencil, and we're going to start with this very lovely warm up exercise. When you do flourishing, you want to think about ovals a lot. I'll become a bit more obvious later on when we actually art flourishes to lattice. But for now, I just want you to try and maybe do one oval with your pencil. It's very lightly. Maybe try to slant it to the right a little bit. Just do on slowly and carefully, and then try to relax your hand. Do hold your pencil at the slant, imagining you're holding a brush pen and relax your hand, so you should feel really heavy. Your elbow should drop down, everything should feel nicely relaxed. We're just going to pick a point, let's say here and we're going to do these circle motions very lightly and just keep moving up pencil anti clockwise. Let's say I'm starting here, and then I'm going to the left. So you can go very lightly and eventually you'll start to see that your line is getting darker because you're going over and over it again and again. This is just an excellent exercise. If you have a look at my hand, you'll notice that I'm not really using my wrist to maneuver my pencil. All I'm doing is I'm gliding my hand up and down a little bit. I'm not stretching my wrist to get to the higher point or lower point. All I'm doing if I need to go higher or lower, I'm just gliding my hand up or down together with my pencil. It's all moving together. I'm not moving my pencil separately. I hope that makes sense. Do try to do this a few times, you can make them as big as you like. Just a nice movement here to remember for flourishing. Lovely. Let's do another one, similarly slanted. But this time, we're going to go around in a clockwise direction. So doing the same thing but clockwise. I don't worry if you are going over the lines a little bit, it's fine. If you notice that, just kind of bring yourself back to this oval shape and do try to follow the first line as much as you can. So fairly quickly, very relaxed movements, working with your whole arm and hand together. Well done. Let's do one that's maybe straight. So let's do a straight oval. Do try to make it look as able as you can. I know it's not very easy if you're not used to this shape. And again, let's just kind of try practicing sticking within these guidelines and moving our hand in this very light way, maybe then change your direction and go clockwise and maybe change halfway through again and go anticlockwise. Just go to practice different directions here. Should feel nice and relaxing. You don't have to worry too much. You're not using a brush pen. Well, then, so let's level up a little bit and to something like this, number eight. Again, do try to make these as as you can both of these loops. So we're going to start from the center and again, do the same thing, kind of just follow the shape with the same movement, gliding our hand, trying to stick within these lines, which can be a bit of a challenge. Especially the faster you go, you don't necessarily want to go slowly. So when you flourish, it's actually quite a fast movement. It's a very fast and controlled movement. So that's what we're trying to get here, and then maybe change direction again. Try going the other way. Try avoiding doing this where you are really engaging your fingers and moving your wrist. So now we do want to move our whole hand kind of together. Well, then we're going to do one more, and this one might feel a bit tricky, so I'll show you a few times. So the initial shape we're going to do is this start here, that'll be the center. Then we're going to do this kind of number eight again, but then we're going to go sideways. And do another one, but in a horizontal way. I'll look like a little flower. Again, we're trying to keep all of these little petals, if you will, quite oval. If they're not very oval, just correct them a little bit to get them to the shape you want. And we are going to go from the center and do this lovely loop motion. Starting from the middle going up to the left, down back to center. From here, we're going to go straight to the right. To the left, back to center. When we back here, we're going to go up again, down, do this shape and then straight to the right back to the left, back to center. If you need to watch this a few times, that's absolutely normal. Took me a while at fast as well. So do this very slowly with me. Once again going up, down to the right to the left, back to center, how we'll pause, go up, down and just continue. Once you get this, just continue going again in this kind of quick motion. Very good. If you lose your direction, just start again and we can try going the other way, so we'll start from the center and then go to the right down. Back up and then to the left to the right, back to center, and again, up, down, back to center, to the left, to the right, back to center. Again, just try to do this a few times. This is such a good exercise. Makes you focus as well, which is good because you do need to focus when you do flourishing as well. There we go, just a quick little exercise warming up your hand. If you want to, you can carry on, use your page and maybe do some of these a bit pick up. This will also be very good. Sometimes you'll find that you need to move your hand quite a lot across the page. You can make some of these ovals like slant it on another side. Now, this which way feels a bit more natural. Is it going to the right or is it going to the left kind of so clockwise or anticlockwise, you'll find that one way feels a bit more natural. I think for me, it's definitely antiiclock wise. It's interesting, isn't it? So do try to notice that. You can even do one that's like horizontal. This will be also very, very useful to practice. Some flourishes are horizontal. And when you do this one, maybe try to keep your hand where you would when you're lettering, maybe don't bring it down here, but just keep it on the side still because that would be the position you're in when you're doing lettering, if that makes sense. So do try to keep your hand there and just try doing this a few times over and over again. There we go. Just a lovely little exercise to get you warmed up for flourishing before we dig a bit deeper. 15. Underline Flourish: You've just warmed up your hand, it should feel nice and warm in this area, which is really, really good for flourishing. We are going to grab our brush pen. I'm going to be using my tumble with a zuki a fine tip brush pen. I feel like mine is running out of ink already again. So you might need to replace your pens twice or three times throughout the course. The new pens are just a little bit easier to work with. I highly recommend keeping on top of it. I'm going to name this lesson flourishing lettuce. And just like when we were learning bouncy lettering style, we are going to try and practice individual lettuce first and try to flourish them. So there are, again, just very similar to bouncy lettering. There are certain lettuce that are easier to flourish to have more opportunity for flourishing, and we're just going to go through them together. So we're going to practice a few flourishing types. So these are kind of very, very beginner flourishes. So the first flourish we're going to do is the underlying flourish. And those are the ones that go below the letter. And we'll try and explore a bit more. So we're going to start with very simple version and then do a few more interesting variations. Again, just like in bouncy lettering style, letters N and M are very, very common in flourishing. So maybe let's try doing the letter together. And when we do the last down stroke, I'm still dividing my letter into two parts as usual. But when I'm going down, I'm going to bring this last stroke. To the left. I made this little loop here and I extended this stroke and then looped it again. What I want you to try and notice here is that we're actually doing this shape that we practiced with our pencil, if you remember. It's literally the number eight, a little infinity sign here. That's what we're trying to do, we're keeping our flourishes nice and oval, as oval as you can. Okay, so maybe let's try doing this again. So just do this a few times to get used to it. Try to keep this line kind of horizontal. Notice that I'm going fairly quickly, but kind of with control. You want to control your brush so you don't go too thick. You want this line to be super thin, imagining that this is an abs stroke. So flourishes are always, always thin. Let's try again. So doing the letter M, doing the last downstroke and then straightaway, bringing it into a little loop and finishing with a lovely little half oval shape here. You can grab your pencil and just check whether you can fit ovals in here. Wherever you look, you should be able to fit a little oval shape. Bad here, bead here, so definitely something to look out for. I'll just show you a very common mistake that I often see when beginners to flourish. It's very normal if it's happening to you as well. Just try to correct it early on. What I see often is that you kind of bring your stroke a bit too low. So instead of keeping this stroke kind of vertical or diagonal, we want it to be horizontal, go underneath the letter. In a nice horizontal way like this, okay? Another thing you might notice is that your loops are not kind of open. Maybe they're looking something like this, you know, which is exaggerating, probably, but you do want to have a nice loop here and also finish the stroke with a lovely half oval here at the end. If you find it difficult, you can even extend this last stroke a bit more and maybe finish it like this. So just to show you could finish it a bit more by kind of doing this, kind of bringing your stroke a bit more to the right and down. So you do get this lovely kind of number eight shape very clearly. So that's not what we're doing. I'm just going to cross these out. So do try to kind of fine tune at this point. And then let's try doing the same thing with the let N so we're just bringing it to the left. Let's do that with the letter, which is another very common letter to flourish. If you really wanted to, you could also flourish the letter A. In the same way. I do think it kind of makes it look a bit like if the letter Q. So I never actually flourish my letters A. So for this type of flourish, I would say letters M, N and R would be the most popular ones to use. Remember, you can always go the other way. There are certain letters that will look nice when you go to the right. For example, you could do a nice underline flourish with the letter G. And just take it to the right. You might think that it's not actually a floris, it's just like an extended stroke, but we do consider this as a little flourish, especially if you finish it with a lovely little tail here. You could do this with a letter J. All the letters that go below the baseline basically, letter P this might look nice when you're underlining a word. Imagine I've done the letter G here and I'm going to letter the rest of the word on this line. It's a little underline, literally. This can look quite nice. So we can add a nice little something, so maybe a little inside loop. So do try this. So when you do your letter J, for example, just kind of in one moment, I'm not picking up my hand, adding a little loop in the middle here and then stretch your stroke to the right and then finish again, like a half oval shape. It's very common to do with the letter S as well. Probably won't really work on the letter P, but the letter S would be another good example. I just want you to try and practice this underline style flourish for now and try to get used to it before we take it further. Practicing these individual letters can be very, very helpful. We want to start easy and then progress. This is a really, really good starting point. 16. Stylised Underline Flourishing & Putting Them Into Words: In this lesson, we're going to continue focusing on the line flourishes, but we're going to take them further. We're going to name this lesson underline flourish. What we're going to do, we're going to fill this page with just three letters MN and R, and we're going to explore different ways of using this underline flourish and maybe experiment a little bit. I want you to try and maybe write at the end. Not just copy what I'm doing here, but also take it a little bit further. Do try to take some new directions with your hand and just try something on your own. Practice a really, really basic one where we just go to the left and add a little half oval. The next thing we're going to do is take it a bit further and just continue the line to the right. As I said, we're going to be doing three letters, MN and R. The reason I've picked those letters is because they are the most common letters for this type of flourish. Every time you see this letter in the middle of your word, you can apply this flourish to your word. Let's just try doing this where we do the letter M. And we're going to the left. And now we're also going to go to the right and go to finish here. Let's try again. I'm not gonna talk this time. We're doing this in one movement. We're focusing on ovals. We're trying not to make it too vertical, keeping it nicely horizontal, we can find some nice loops in here and in here. Everything is nice and oval. Maybe try this one more time, but this time we can maybe add in something else. So we could the little loop. Add the little loop, when we do this, got a fast loop. So adding like a little one again. So this might look very messy the first time you do it. You know, it's fine. Don't worry about it. It will take a bit of time to get there. It might look quite shaky. I might look just unnatural. And that is so so common. I just don't want you to think that, you know, you can't do it because your first attempt doesn't look good. I promise it just comes with practice, but we're just pushing ourselves, trying something else. And this is so so important. These type of exercises is what's going to help you to push through. Okay, so let's do a similar thing with the letter N. So we are doing the underline, flourish to the left, and then just kind of continuing to the right. And we're still focusing on just kind of making this shape into the infinity sign. So it looks like just like this continuous line. It's nicely kind of proportional. So it just looks quite nice. What I also love to do, and I call this a little secret in flourishing. So once you finish your flourish, or sometimes you can also do it at the beginning of your entry stroke, for example, once you've lifted up your pen, you can add in a tiny little flourish. For example, you can just go in here, add an extra loop and just extend your existing flourish. We could do this, for example, at the beginning and at the end of your word or letter in this case. I've done it in pencil just to demonstrate, but all you do you just point your pen where you've finished and then just in one continuous movement in a thin stroke, just add on a little loop followed by again, a little tiny flourish like this. I also love doing this at the beginning of the letter. Again, I'm pointing my pen where I started. My stroke, and I'm just going to go back in, maybe go over the stroke a little bit, so it feels a bit more natural. And now, again, kind of looping it a little bit. Might take a bit of focus, which is fine. You can also use a pencil to give yourself some guidelines here. So that's something to add in, and I call that like a little flourishing secret. Okay, so let's try again, doing this version where we added in, like, a tiny loop. So we're going to go down quick and thin. Slow down here, we'll be doing a loop and just bring the stroke back to the right. Well done, we don't have too much room here. We can maybe squeeze in a little flourish here. Maybe do something like this. So I really improvised here. But what I've done, I've just taken my loop to the left, did another loop, and finished the stroke here, picked up my pen, and then added in a little secret flourish at the end. I just want you to have that feeling as well. Just maybe give it a go, see where your pen takes you. Maybe this is not the flourish I would use very frequently, but that experimenting will kind of guide you to the place you want to be at. Okay, let's try doing the letter R. And maybe let's try just doing this with the letter R to begin with. We're not even doing the underline here. A we're doing, we're making this big loop and then very sharply finishing with this stroke. If you have a look here, again, if you connect this, we get a lovely oval, which is what we're looking for here. Let's maybe try doing just an extended underline flourish again. This sort of thing. You loops might be a bit more narrow or wide. I will just depend on your style. You can try this one again with a little loop on the inside. And now I make it look easy. Just please, please take your time. It's not an easy technique. It might take a bit of time to get this stroke nice and thin, nice and consistent. It's fine if it's looking a bit thick at the beginning. Just keep practicing. There are also some worksheets for you which you can print and trace, and that will actually help you to build up the muscle memory a bit more. So definitely make use of those. So here we go. I think what we can try and do maybe put some of these letters into an actual word. I will show you how it would look when you use the are in the middle of the word. I'm going to do the word rain and I'm going to start with the letter R. Because it is the beginning of the word, I'm not going to do anything crazy here, so just a little underline flourish and I might add in a little secret flourish just to make it a little bit more interesting like this. What's tricky here? We want to be very mindful of not leaving a big gap in between our letters, your previous flourish letter and your next letter want to be very close together. In this case is the letter A, and I'm going to position it here very close to the letter. I'm not starting it here, leaving a huge gap. I'm going to do the letter I. When I get to the letter N, I'm just going to do a fairly narrow flourish. I don't want to interfere with this letter R, so my flourish here has to be fairly small. There we go and maybe dd in a little secret flourish here as well. Do something like this. Obviously, you can do whatever you like. After you do your initial underline flourish, you can then go different direction, add extra loops. You can add your sec flourishing in different different ways. But this could be one example, and I think it looks quite okay. So maybe let's try doing this again. So really rarely, your flourishing would look nice the first time you do it. Flourishing does require planning, and it's very, very normal to do it a few times until you're happy with your results. So I'm just going to do it again as well. So do try to kind of get used to that flow and maybe do it the third time if you feel like that will make you progress more. Right, so we're going to do another word. Let's do the word mountain. It's a bit of a longer word, and we have the letter M and N in there to end, actually. So that would be a good example. So I would start with the letter M, again, because it's the beginning of the word, I want to make it fairly subtle. This kind of fast flourish. Maybe once I've done this, I've picked up my pen, and I'm going to odd in a little secret flourish stretching to here, you can do the same thing. Starting the letter O very close to the letter M, maybe making it a bit smaller, which is fine. Right. I've got the letter coming up and I can flourish it, but just know that you don't necessarily have to flourish both letters in your word. In this case, I think it would look quite nice if we just do the beginning of the word and the end of the word. I'm going to leave the middle of the word just normal, not going to do much to the letter, just maybe add a bit of bounce. Because if there are too many flourishes, that's also not good because it becomes really hard to read, and all these flourishes can interfere with each other, and it'll just be really difficult to make sure they don't overlap. So, generally speaking, we don't want our flourishing lines to overlap. So if I did my flourish for the letter here, you know, my lines probably would have, um, overlapped a little bit, which is not a huge mistake. Some people actually do it and they make it look nice. I don't think I'm a fan. It just makes it look a bit too messy for my taste. But yeah, that's just an example. And we still have the letter end right at the end. So we can use this flourish at the end, make it quite big. Even add an extra loop in there, and then maybe even add in like a secret flourish. So there we go. I made room for bigger flourish at the end rather than flourishing the letter in the middle. Another thing to remember is that when you do flourishing at the bottom of your word, you want to balance out the top of the word as well. So having your flourish just at the bottom here might look a bit heavy. So we do have a cross line over the letter T, and we could do something interesting with it. I think I'm just going to do a long cross line to begin with. You want to, you can then blend in some secret flourishes. I'm going to go back to the beginning of the stroke. Maybe just adding little secret flourishes like this, still keeping them thin. Now I think it looks a bit more balanced in a way. There we go. That's pretty much it. We covered underlying flourishes in this lesson and practice doing these little secret flourishes can be a game changer that can literally transform your existing flourishes. There are a few more tips I want to share with you, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. Entry & Exit Flourishing: This lesson, we're going to talk about some different types of flourishes and we'll mostly be covering entry and exit stroke flourishes. So this can apply to the beginning and the end of the letter or word or your phrase, to be honest. So that will be something you start your letters and words with and finish your letters and words. And when you combine that with underlined flourishes, which is something we covered in previous lesson, you'll be able to flourish the beginning, the middle, and the end of the word. I'm going to call this lesson entry and exit stroke flourishes. Every time you begin your word, you would usually have some sort of an entry stroke, and you can use that stroke and you can flourish it. There are some different ways. You can flourish it. You can do something very, very simple where you could just add a few loops. To your entry stroke, there can be different types of loops. You can even do something like this. So this is something where you can really get creative, and this is probably one of the easiest ways to add flourishes to the beginning of your lattice. So just a very simple example, maybe you could try to get that. Let's let the ward yellow. So, you know, we could start our letter Y with a nice little entry flourish. And then just do the ward as normal. When you reach the end of the word, you could again maybe add like a tiny little flourish. This is just an example to show you that entry and exit strokes are probably one of the most popular ways of starting to flourish your lettering. Another interesting flourish you could try and this would mostly apply to capital letters that start with this type of stroke, probably the letters M or N, so just to show you an example. So this sort of C shape stroke, you could add a lovely little entry stroke to that that would look like this. We do a little C shape and then just go over it again and do another C shape. And then stretch our stroke up and notice how I'm adding a bit of pressure here. I'm making the s shape a little bit thick. Remember when I said the flourishes are mostly thin, and that is true for most of them and especially the underlying ones, the ones we've practiced already. But when you do this particular s shape one, don't be afraid to add a bit of thickness. It just makes it look a little bit more rich, if that makes sense. That could be something you add to your uppercase lettus that start with this. C shaped stroke. If you are case, let us have some sort of cross lines, like the letter A, for example, make it a bit more interesting and try to merge that cross line into a little flourish. Now it is how it started the letter A from here and it made this little kind of swush and it just looks like a lovely little flourish. So there's a lot of room for experimentation. So capital lettuce are generally really, really good to flourish. Another really interesting little flourish you can add at the end of your word is this. So this applies to certain lettuce again. So a few of those letters are the letter Y, for example, you could bring the flourish up above the letter and do this little infinity sign. This can look really good. Just to show an example, maybe I would let the word try. We could do this together. I would finish my word with a letter Y and then bring it up here. And do a lovely little flourish at the top here so that can look really good. There are so many wars that finish with a letter Y. I do actually use this technique quite often because it's just really convenient and as I said, the letter Y is very common. I also love adding a little half version of this flourish. For example, if I'm finishing the war with the letter E, I love doing something like this so bringing your stroke and then doing a little loop and then just doing this little half oval shape here again, so that can look really nice. You can do that through the letter A, as well. So any letter that would finish with this stroke, so you can actually stretch it up and add a little flourish or probably the letter I anyway. I just looks like the letter I, doesn't it? A downstroke or upstroke, part of the letter can be flourished in this way. That's something you can definitely definitely try and apply to your letters. The last little flourish I want to cover is something we would probably do in the middle of the word, but you could also start your word with it. So it would be extending this first stroke. Of the letter. And this will probably apply to lettuce like L, B, D, so as and the lettuce. The ones that stretch up. Just to show an example, I might just do the word and, very simple. And when I do my letter D, I would just detoch that stroke that little entry stroke of the letter and just do it above the word like this. Another good example would be the letter so we could actually merge two letters together. Using this entry stroke of the letter H to go over the letter T, and it will act as a little cross line. Basically, we put these two letters together. And this is really, really popular. You might see this a lot in lettering. Every time I do my word there, for example, I would always use this technique, and it just makes it look a bit more interesting. So lettuce T and H are quite common together. So you'll see this a lot. So every time you have these lettuce together, remember you can use this little technique. So here we go. I hope this, again, gave you a bit more inspiration, something a bit more interesting to try. There are some worksheets you can trace, and I kind of try to blend in some of these flourishes so you can practice them. But just remember, it's an ongoing learning process and you'll build your little library flourishes all the time, and this is just inspiration. I'm sure you'll be picking up many more styles along the way. But this is just a really, really good starting point if you've never tried flourishing before. Well, then, guys, 18. Embellished Flourished Composition: The last thing we'll cover up this week is embellishment flourishes, and that's something you can add around your words and letters, and we're going to do a little final project at the bottom of the page as well. Let's name this lesson. Embellishment. Flourishing. So this can be really pretty. So once you finish your phrase, you might want to add something on the top or at the bottom of your page, and it could be anything, literally, starting from little swashes like this, you know, to something a bit more interesting and maybe adding something like this where you kind of do this sort of flourish and then you go back in here and take it up a little bit like that. Then you can add in something in the middle here. This time, I'm just adding these little raindrops. This can look really good. Or even doing something like this. Probably something you've seen before. I like finishing these with a little dot and also starting them with a little dot. This is a bit tricky. So do take your time with it. I am thickening this down stroke, so you want to go to the side and thicken at the same time. Another one I really like, you can position your page like this. I call it like a little question mark flourish. It looks like this. But you can add on quite a few. And it just looks really, really nice when you do, like, a few of these. You can even add in, like, a thick line somewhere along the way. So yeah, these can definitely look quite pretty. Even just like doing maybe one. Again, doing a little opening. Oh my pen is really fraying, you can tell. This is going to look quite nice at the end of the word or at the beginning of the word. If you really wanted to, you could even add it to your entry stroke. Let's say I've done the letter M here and I've had my very long entry stroke. You could then turn your page like this and just extend this into these little Um, question marks, you know, just kind of adding a bit of detail here. You can even add some flourish details. Just use the tip of your brush to maybe add in some leaves. So something very simple. It doesn't have to be complicated, but it can definitely look really, really nice. And we're going to do something lovely as a little final project for this week. We're going to practice more words and phrases, kind of putting it all together at the end of the week during the live session. I just want you to process it all for now, practice these individual elements separately, and then we're going to try putting them together into some phrases. Now, we're going to let the word bloom, but we're going to add some lovely, interesting detail to it. G to remember the first time we do it might not be the actual final piece. It'll just be the work in progress, and you can always do it again on a card or a nicer piece of paper at the end. So consider this being just planning process. So we're going to let the word bloom, but I just want to practice some individual elements of this word first. So we can do the letter B like this. Where we just do B and then we take it to the side and do this underline flourish like that. Maybe practice this a few times. At the end, we're going to do the letter M, nice and bouncy and then bring it up. And to the side like this. If you want to, you can blend in a secret flourish here. You don't have to, but it could be another thing. Just take your time maybe practicing these two letters for now until you're happy with the way they look. The last thing I want you to practice here is doing this. When you turn your page horizontally, I want you to practice this little chain of going up and down and applying pressure, it creates this little Chain flourish. Do take a bit of time. And when you're ready, I'm just going to use another page here. We're going to put these two into an actual word. So we're going to start the letter B. Just like we practice, it's a lovely little flourish. Thinking of loops. Keeping them oval. That's what we're looking for here. Then I'm going to do my letter L in a very simple style like this very close to the letter B. It's all going to be a bit bouncy so we can actually fit these letters here because we already have a big flourish underneath. We're going to do the letter M just like we practiced, bounce it down, bring it up, stop here and if you want to are done. A little secret flourishing there. So we could do this one more time. You know, sometimes things will not go great and you might need to correct some things like my downstroke here just turned out to be a bit jittery. I'm just going over and correcting it slightly. Okay, so this is not it. What we're going to add to this is a few more strokes just to make this design look a bit more interesting. We're going to use this long stroke and make it into a little bouquet of flowers. So what we're going to do, we're just going to add with a tip of the brush, some extra strokes kind of coming out of here like this. And we're going to tie them together with this little chain flourish, you remember. So that will look like a little ribbon, if you will. Okay. And now we have this lovely kind of bunch, and we can do anything, really. So we could add a little leaf here. We could add, like, more leaves on top, so use the tip of your brush to draw these very carefully. I'm just doing this, like, simple leaf shapes, nothing crazy. We could do like one leaf here at the end. We could do maybe some berries. So just making some branches here. So you could get really creative here. You could add on even more strokes if you like. Maybe color some of these leaves in for a bit more contrast. This is just a lovely little example, something you can try. Just so you can see that lettering can be so fun. You can add so many interesting details. This is just one way of using flourishing, making it really creative. I really hope you enjoyed that. Give it a go. I would love to see your progress here. Also if this whole content about flourishing felt super overwhelming and you're really struggling to make your hand not to shake. And just make everything look nice and neat. Please, please know that it's very, very normal. And I'm just trying to give you a lot of information here in one week because you're here, you're learning, and I just want you to soak it all up. But it might actually take much longer than a week to get to the point where you're happy about your work. So even if you've done a bit of progress, that's such a huge step already, and I want you to be proud. Well done, everybody, really well done, I mean it. And I will see you on Sunday for a live session where we're going to get creative together. 19. Well done!: Well, then for completing this course, if you're watching this lesson, I just wanted to say congratulations and well done. You should feel really proud. You've done a lot of work. You've put in a lot of time practicing, and I'm sure it's paying off. I'm sure you're seeing progress. And remember that your journey doesn't end here. You always continue learning and developing your style and becoming even more and more confident. So now you have all the knowledge. You've gone through so much foundational work. We practice pen control, repetition. So there's a lot that we've already done, and it's really up to you to kind of just refine whatever it is that needs more work. And that's how we build confidence, and that's how we become professional calligraphers. We lay the foundations, we do repetition, we learn and control. Our muscle memory gets better time as well, and it just becomes so much more natural and we feel much more confident. I'm wishing you the best of luck with your calligraphy journey, and remember that practice makes progress.