Modern Brush Calligraphy: Envelope Essentials

1. Class Preview: One of the best ways to showcase and practice your calligraphy skills is through envelopes. While weddings do get the lion share of attention when it comes to beautifully scripted mail, your thank you notes, holiday cards, and even your strongly worded letters to the editor can also benefit from the brush calligraphy treatment. But where to start? Hi, I'm Kim Shrack from Manayunk Calligraphy. In this class, you'll learn everything yo need to know about the art of the envelope. Including proper addressing format, rules of etiquette, and when to break them, post office requirements, tips for choosing supplies, unique and eye catching layouts, blending and using color, and so much more. Before you take this course, you should have a good understanding of calligraphy basics. If you haven't already, I recommend taking my Intro to Modern Brush Calligraphy course here on Skillshare. When you're ready, grab your brush pens, some envelopes, and your crazy creative selves, and click "Play". Your mail carrier will thank you. 2. What You'll Need: Intro & Materials: Hello and welcome to class. My name is Kim Schrack and I'm the owner of Manayunk Calligraphy. You may have taken some of my other classes before, if not, you can find me on Instagram @MNYKcalligraphy. As a professional calligrapher, I get to do lots of really, really fun things including product design, murals, chalkboards, signs, I even get to paint on macros, which is really, really fun. But the bread and butter for me and for most calligraphers is addressing envelopes. Now a lot of people think that, "Well, I'm not getting married, I don't have a wedding coming up, so why do I really need calligraphy on envelopes?" It'd be fun to do, but does anybody really want calligraphy on my thank you notes, or my holiday card, or my invitation to binge watch Game of Thrones. The answer rather is yes, yes, yes, yes. People would love to get an envelope with your beautiful calligraphy on it in their mailbox. Just because you're not getting married doesn't mean that there's not lots and lots of opportunities to send out envelopes with beautiful calligraphy on them, and that's one of the reasons I really love brush calligraphy for envelopes because it is quicker, but you still have the beautiful look of calligraphy and all the extra care that goes into doing things by hand. But you get to move a little bit faster and it has more of a modern casual look. Now before we get started into all this fun stuff, we do need to go over some of the things you're going to need for this class. Now, the first thing you're going to need is a background and modern brush calligraphy. If you've done modern brush calligraphy before, you don't need to be an expert in it to take this class, you just need to know the basics. You need to be able to know how to script a name and address. Now if you aren't familiar with modern brush calligraphy, or if you'd like to get a little bit of a reminder, I would highly recommend you take my class: Introduction to modern brush calligraphy. It's going to teach you absolutely everything you need to know to get started in this super fun art form. So once you have done all that, you've got the basics and you're ready to go, let's go into the different supplies that we're going to need. Now the first supply, I guess it's not an actual supply, is you need a reason to be sending out these envelopes. Now, the reason can be as simple as I love my grandma and I want to send her a letter. But you can also do it like I said for thank you notes. A lot of people send out cards around the holidays, that's a really great time to use calligraphy. I use it for parties that we throw, anytime it's my daughter's birthday, we'll send out invitations and I will do it all up in calligraphy. But she's only one, so I've only had the chance to do that once, but I still send out tons and tons. We have a Halloween party every year, I send out themed invitations that I always try to do the calligraphy to go with the theme for that year. I send them out on thank you notes. I've never sent a strongly-worded letter to an editor, but I think that if I did, I would definitely use calligraphy on it, just to give it a little bit more oomph. So whatever your reason is, get one and that's really the first thing that you're going to need. Now in terms of physical supplies, of course, you're going to need envelopes. I've got some envelopes here, I'm going to show you. Now, there are a few things to consider when you're choosing your envelopes that are going to be sending your letters that you're going to be calligraphing. I don't know if that's a word, so let's say scripting, that you're going to be scripting on. Now, if you are doing this with thank you cards or holiday cards that you've ordered online, they'd probably come with envelopes. Now the envelopes that come with those are usually not the best quality in the world. They're usually very thin, they have usually a square flap on the back, and they're not the greatest. But that's one of the cool things about using brush calligraphy. When you're using dip ink, you have to really be concerned about the paper because it could bleed everywhere. But for the markers that we're going to be talking about today, which are the Faber-Castell PITT artists brush pens and the Tombow dual tip brush pens, and then we'll also use the Fudenosuke pens a little bit as well. Those really don't bleed much, even on that really thin paper. Now, I will tell you I've ordered things through like Vistaprint or Uprinting and they've come with the envelopes, and I have used all those brush pens on them, and I've never had a problem. So if it comes with free envelopes, you might as well give it a test first to see if it'll work before you go out and invest in additional envelopes. But that being said, I do love a pretty envelope, so sometimes even when I've ordered from those sites, my invitations or my thank you cards, I will head over to my favorite place in the world which is Paper Source and I will pick out envelopes. Now if you've never been to a Paper Source, it's heaven. They have envelopes in every color you can imagine, in all the major sizes and they are beautiful, I love this store. I have told my husband on many occasions that should I pass away before him, I would really like him to scatter my ashes at Paper Source. Health code aside and that should tell you how much I really love this store. A couple things when you are at Paper Source or whatever store you choose to go to for your envelopes, the first thing you want to think about is your color. Like I said, at Paper Source they come in so many different colors. This is one of so many pinks, so many pinks that they have. They have tons and tons of colors for you to choose from. Now here's the thing with brush markers, most brush markers are not opaque. That means that you really can't do a super dark envelope. You really can't do a black envelope with the Tombows or the Faber-Castells. Now that being said, there are some brush markers that are opaque, especially metallic brush markers. One of my favorite metallic brush markers is a chi-pen and I will post exactly what it's called or where you can find it in the class resources section, but that can work for very dark envelopes. But unless you're using one of those, then you really need to stick with an envelope that is lighter or that black ink will look good on. The second thing that you want to consider with your envelopes is the texture. The texture of the envelope will have a minimal impact on your brush pen, honestly. When you're working with pointed pen and deep ink, you need to be very careful if your envelope has what's called a high tooth, meaning it's very textured. If you feel it you could feel a lot of ridges on it. The reason you need to be careful with a pointed pen, is if the pen catches any of those ridges, you're going to have an ink splatter and a huge mess. But with a brush pen, it doesn't matter quite as much. Now that being said there are extremes. For example if you're working with handmade paper that has a really high heavy tooth, really a lot of texture, you might have some trouble there. But for the most part, the envelopes that you're going to get are Paper Source or wherever you are sourcing your materials, they're going to have a tooth that's going to work pretty well with a brush marker. Now another thing you need to consider with your envelopes is the shape. The standard envelope shape is rectangular. But you can also get square envelopes, you can get envelopes that have the rounded corners. You can get some different shapes. I guess I shouldn't say a lot. You can get some different shapes for your envelopes. But a word of caution, if you are in the US and you are shipping these through the post office, the square envelopes and any envelope that isn't rectangular is going to have an extra charge to it. We're going to talk more about that in a later video but just in the beginning before you go and spend an exorbitant amount of money on square on envelopes. Just remember that you're going to have an extra fee to ship those. Know another thing that you want to consider of course is the size. Now most people are going to be sending around a 5 by 7 envelope. That's what this is here. That's going to be the standard. You of course have options that are smaller and larger than that. But if you are planning on sending through the US Post Office and you want to avoid any extra fees, you need to make sure that your envelope is at least as big as three and a half by five inches, and you need to make sure it's no larger than six and an eighth inches. Let me just check there. Yeah, six and an eighth, very specific. Six and an eighth inches tall by 11 and a half inches wide. That's pretty big. It's highly unlikely that you're going to be sending any letter that the envelope is larger than that. But just to keep in mind. Again we're going to go over all of the post office requirements in a future video, but just something to have in the back of your head there. The other thing to consider when doing your envelopes is the back flap of the envelope. Which I know seems like a bizarre thing to think about, but actually all of the envelopes that I have here are what's called a euro flap. This is the most common one that you're going to see. Let me hold it up like this. It is a little bit longer than a traditional just pointed envelope when you think of that, and it has a rounded tip at the bottom. Now a pointed flap is just what it sounds like. It looks very similar to this, except it's usually shorter and it comes to a very fine point. A square flap is exactly what it sounds like. It just as a little square in the back. Again if you're going to sourcing envelopes from paper supply stores such as Paper Source or other stationary stores, more likely than not they're going to be euro flap. But if they ask you specifically, now you have the knowledge, the vocab to really sound like you know what you're doing and say, "Yes, I'll take the euro flap please." Those are envelopes; color, texture, shape, size, and the flap if that's something that is important to you. Now of course you're also going to need your brush markers. As I mentioned before, in this class today we're going to be using the Tombow Dual Tip brush pens, as well as the Faber-Castell Pitt Artist brush pens. These are both really great pens and they come in a ton of variety of colors and they're pretty easy for you to work with even if you're a beginner. They also have some cool blending effects that you can do which again we're going to be discussing more in a future video. We're also going to be using the Tombow Fudenosuke Pen every now and then as well. This pen is great. If you want something that looks a bit more like pointed pen, this is a very fine brush tip so you do get those really delicate hair lines. The one bomber about this though is that it comes in just a few colors. It doesn't have as wide of a color variation as the others, but if you just need a black pen, it works great. Now, you're also going to need a few tools to make sure that your lines are straight and to help you with some of the unique layouts that we're going to be doing. You're going to need a ruler. Now, any old ruler will do but I like these where they're see-through and you can really see the delineation with little grid there. That's helpful to me if it's not helpful to you then, forget about it. A t-square is also not necessary but it's really helpful. This again ensures that your lines are straight. It's just lines up here on the edge of the envelope. Can help you draw very straight lines. You're also going to need a pencil to draw those lines, as well as an eraser. Now, if you are scripting on a dark envelope, a black on envelope or even navy blue, or a really dark gray, you're going to want to get a black eraser. If you try to use a white eraser on a black envelope or a really dark on envelope, what could end up happening is that you'll remove a little bit of the pigment of the paper with this. You want to make sure you're using the black eraser for the darker envelopes. Now, here is one thing that you don't need, but if you're planning on doing a lot of envelopes in your near future, I have a fun little tool I recommend. This is called the slide writer, and as you can see by all the ink stains all over it I use this a lot in my work. It's a little laser. Let's see if I can turn it on here. There we go. It's a little laser level. Then it's got marks over here that you can use when you are addressing your envelope. If you're working on a ton at a time and you don't want to draw guidelines every single time, this is great. It's not that expensive and if you are planning on using it a lot, it's a really great investment. I love my slide writer and I'll post a link to that in the class resources section so you can take a look. But again, it's not necessary but it is super cool to have. You're also of course, going to need some stamps. We'll talk more about choosing stamps when we get to our post office requirements video. In the meantime, gather all your supplies when you have them together, I'll see you in the next video. 3. Art of Addressing, Part 1: Etiquette: In this video, we're going to be talking all about addresses. How to format them for your envelopes, how to make them easy for you to read and also for the post office to understand, as well as everybody's favorite thing to discuss etiquette. We're going to start off with etiquette and how you should address your envelopes. Now, I'm going to preface all of this by saying, you do not need to follow these strict rules of etiquette, you absolutely don't. When I'm sending out personal correspondence, very rarely do I include all the appropriate titles and follow all the rules. I usually just send out to Katie and Dave, Falco, or to grandma and grandpa if it's a letter coming from my daughter. You you really don't need to follow these things. That being said, if you are sending out invitations for a formal event like a wedding or a graduation, addressing the envelopes using the formal etiquette can like let people know what kind of event this is going to be. I'm going to share with you some of the more common situations that you're going to run into when you are addressing your envelopes. Now, these are just a few of the most common. There are tons and tons of living situations out there that you might run into when you are trying to address your envelopes. My recommendation if you have any situation that I'm not covering here today, is to checkout Emily Post. Emily Post is the resource for all kinds of etiquette, so I highly recommend using that resource.Now, for a formal invitation, if you are sending it to a single man, you're going to use Mr. as the title, unless he is a doctor or a captain or has some other designation. In that case, you're going to use that designation instead of Mr, so Mr. John Smith. Easy. Now, for a single woman, you can use Mrs, if she's married, but you're just sending her the invitation. You can also use Mrs, if she is a widow and still prefers to go by Mrs. But for the most part, if you're sending to a single woman, you're going to use Ms. M-S. Do not use Miss. Miss is for a young girl so you don't want to use that would be Ms. Jane Smith, MS. So those are individuals. Those are pretty easy. But when it comes to couples and families, it can get a little bit more difficult. For opposite sex, married couples, the traditional standard formal etiquette when they share a last name is Mr. and Mrs. Man's first name shared last name, so Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Now as a calligrapher, I don't mind that, because that's less for me to write, and so when I'm doing hundreds and hundreds of envelopes, they know it goes a little bit quicker. But as a married woman, it bums me out when my name isn't included on the envelope. If you want to include the woman and the man's first names on the envelope when they share the same last name, you're going to write out each person's full name and join them with the word and. It would be Ms. Jane Smith & Mr. John Smith. Not Mr. and Mrs. Jane and John Smith. Not that. Ms. Jane Smith and Mr. John Smith. That's if they share the same last name and you want to include both first names. Now if they don't share the same last name, you're going to script it out each name individually combined with the word and. That's how it is for my husband and I. We don't have the same last name, so when we get letters addressed to us for formal events, it will be to Ms. Kimberly Shrack and Mr. Daniel Tritch. It doesn't matter which one goes first. Traditionally, the woman's name goes first, but I've seen it all different ways and I don't think that there's too much fuss about that. Now, again, any kind of professional designation such as doctor, or captain, or lieutenant, that would go above the Mr. and Ms. Now, there is all sorts of rules about if each person has one of those designations, which one goes first. I'm going to leave that to Emily Post to clear up for you, because if we get into that, we'll be talking about nothing but that for the rest of our time here. Again, if they have different last names, each name individually, full name with an and connecting them. For a same-sex couple, it's a little bit different. If a same-sex couple is married and shares the same last name, you can do for two men, you can do them Messrs. It would be the beginning of it. So the Messrs. John and Adam Smith. That would be the appropriate way to address that. You can also do the same as you did with married couples. If you want to do Mr. John Smith and Mr. Adam Smith, you can do that as well, but typically it's the Messrs. I like that because it sounds a little fancier. It's nice. For two women, it's the Mesdames. So the Mesdames. Ashley and Jane Smith. Again, if they have different last names, it would be the same as for an opposite sex couple. Where you would do the whole name, whole name combined with and. Now I know I'm hitting the and a lot. But the and is very important because the and is reserved. Again, this is only in formality. You do not have to file this, but in etiquette, and is reserved for married couples or couples who live together. If you are addressing it to a person who has a significant other, but they don't live together and they're not married, than etiquette says that you don't combine them with an and. Etiquette says that you put one name on one line and then the next name on the other line and don't combine it with and. Don't shoot the messenger on this one, that's just what etiquette dictates. Again, if they are married or live together, etiquette dictates that you combine them with and, and you try to keep them on the same line. That's not always possible, especially for long names, so don't worry so much about that. But as long as they're connected by the and, then you're following etiquette. Now the last little bit that you may run into is when you're sending these to families. When you're sending to a family, you're going to put the name of the parent or parents or guardians top, just like we've discussed. So whether it's a same-sex couple, opposite sex couple, or a single person, you're going to put their names first and then on the next line, you're going to write the names of the children. Now for a formal invitation, you would write out the full name. So Jane Smith and Michael Smith, or whatever it is for the children's names. That's what you would do if it's a family. Now, informally, if you're sending it to a family, you could send it to The Henderson family, if everybody had the same last name. Again, this is if you're doing it informally, you could include the parent or parents names first, just like you would on a formal invitation and then below, just write the names of the children and don't worry about last names. So parents and then kids names below without the last names, just first names. Like I said, those are the rules of etiquette, but you can pick and choose what you want to do truly. Truly, there is no etiquette police who's going to be reviewing your mail at the post office and saying, "Well, this person used and, and I know that they are long distance and don't live together." Toss. That's not going to happen. Address it however feels comfortable to you and the people who are receiving it, and if you ever have any questions about how to address something to someone, it's okay to ask them. Like I said, my husband and I don't have the same last names and we get a lot of mail, but it has me with his last name and sometimes him with mine. It's okay it doesn't bother us, but if you're ever confused about how somebody is supposed to be addressed or wants to be addressed, definitely call them and ask them. Then you'll always make sure that you are correct. All right, so up next I'm going to show you how to organize all the addresses online in an address book, and then how to format them to make your scripting super easy. See you at the computer. 4. Art of Addressing, Part 2: Formatting: Hey everyone. In this section of class, we're going to talk all about organizing our addresses and formatting them to make them easier to script on our envelopes. Unfortunately, we have to spend a little time behind a computer screen. I know when we're used to working with beautiful paper and pens that can be hard to go to the computer, but I promise you it will not take long. Now, if you're planning on doing a one-off project and you're sending to one or two people, you don't need to go through all of this. You can pull up the addresses on your phone or scroll through your address book. But if you're sending a lot of envelopes, a lot of invitations, or holiday cards, or if you plan on doing this frequently, it can be a good idea to maintain an address book. Now, I find that the best format for an address book is a Spreadsheet like this, because it's much easier to sort and go through rather than a tangible handwritten address book. Though handwritten address books are lovely. This is a much more efficient when it comes time to address your envelopes. Another thing I like about this is, I can note what my relationship is to the person and so it makes the addresses easy to store. Let's say, I'm sending out invites for my annual very, very busy Halloween party, and I'm not trying to invite my grandma. So I can sort by relationship to have a pretty solid list of who all I need to invite? Maybe, if I think my grandma's feel up for it, I can add her to that list too. You can also sort by city. If you wanted to invite people to an event that lived in your area, you can sort by all things. That's much more difficult to do if you're using a Word document or you're using a handwritten address book. I like to keep mine in Google Drive. That makes it easy for me to update on the go. It helps me be able to access it anywhere as well. If you are directionally challenged like I am, it can be nice to have all your addresses on your phone and easily accessible. It's also good if you think of somebody you need to invite while you're out and about, or somebody tells you that they've changed addresses, you can make the change right then and there before life happens and you forget. You're going to want to create some column headers that are going to help you when we go on to export this into a format that is more friendly to scripting out on envelopes. You want to have your name. This is going to be what you call the casually, if you were going to be doing an informal invitation, that's what you would put in name. For formal name, this column is not necessary, but if you have any formal events coming up such as a wedding or a graduation, that could be helpful to create a column for this. Now, this is all blank because we are going to practice our new found etiquette skills by writing out the formal names. Then you have address line one, this is the street address or it could be the building. Address line two is more specific. If you put a building, that could be the physical street address, or it could also be an apartment or condo number. Then you've got the city, the state, or the province, depending on the country, the zip code, and the country. Now, for country, if you are sending a letter to somebody in the US, you don't need to put anything here for country. You don't need to have that written on the envelope, so we don't need it here. You only want to put it in, if it's going outside your country of origin. Then again, the relationship column is totally optional, not necessary to have that there. Now, one thing that you do, want to consider when you are writing these all out in your address book is, if you are sending to another country, the country needs to be written in English because the post office here needs to be able to understand where it's going. In these examples, we have United Kingdom and France. Now that I think about it, maybe not the best example, because those are exactly how they're written in their native tongue. But let's say, we were sending something to Germany. You wouldn't want to write Deutschland here, you would want to write Germany. Now that being said, you want to have the province or state, the city and the address lines. Those need to be in the local language because their postal carriers need to be able to understand it. For example, we've got metal line here, and metal line, we wouldn't put six Saint dominate street because that's not the local language, and we would put, we would write it down as somebody there would speak it. We would write it in French. I am not going to attempt a pronunciation, because I think I would butcher it. I don't want to butcher the beautiful French language, so you can see what it's written as they're point is you want to write it in the local language, so that their mail carriers understand where it's going. Now that we have that all sorted out, we're going to go over to our names and we're going to practice our etiquette. If you haven't guessed yet, these names are all characters from some of my favorite TV shows. We've got Lindsay and Tobias Funke from Arrested Development. Their formal address would be Mr. and Mrs. Tobias Funke. Now, one thing that you do want to think about when you are writing these out is that, you want the name written in your Spreadsheet exactly as you're going to write it on your envelope. That's because when we format it, we're going to format it centered. It's going to help us with spacing when we're scripting. If you want an ampersand, if you want it to be spelled out the word and write it out. The same goes for the state. If you want the state written out, then you need to write it out if you want it abbreviated, go ahead and abbreviate it. The next name we've got here, Catherine and Marjorie Meyer-Palmiotti. They are married. They have the same last name. We're going to write The Mesdames Catherine and Marjorie Meyer-Palmiotti. These are characters from VIP. If you don't watch VIP definitely check it out, it's hilarious. Our next couple, now, this is from the show, Peaky Blinders, also amazing. Now they are not married but they do live together. So they are going to be on one line if possible and they're going to be combined with the word and. We have Ms. Elizabeth, we've got the nickname Lizzie, but her real name is Elizabeth. We're going to be formal with it. Elizabeth Stark and Mr. Thomas. Again, we want to have the formal name here Shelby. Now one thing to note about these names, you need to make sure that what you think is a nickname is actually a nickname and not their full name. I know a lot of folks named Katie, who that's just their name and their name is Kate. But then, I know other people whose nicknames are Katie. That's what they'd go by socially, but their actual name on their birth certificate is Catherine or Kathleen. You want to make sure that what you think and nickname actually is. Our next one is for Dinesh Chugtai. This is from Silicon Valley and another amazing show. This one's easy. He's a single man. We're going to write Mr. Dinesh Chugtai. Next one is Madeline Clavel. So Madeline, if you're not familiar with that character from a book, from children's book. She is a little red haired girl. The books are adorable. I loved them when I was a girl and I am very excited to read them to my daughter anyway, because she is a young girl. This is going to be Miss. Now, we have our first family, the Belcher's. The Belcher from Bob's Burgers. For this one we're going to write Mr. and Mrs. Robert Belcher. Now, for their children's names, Tina Belcher, Gene Belcher, Louise Belcher. Now, you'll notice that is super duper long. We already have an apartment there. This could be a huge, huge envelope, if we go through all of this for the etiquette. If this does happen and you need to condense things, you can always put the street and apartment on the same line if you can fit it. You can also put the children's names on the same line. Just make sure instead of separating them with an and, that you separate them with commas, and this is reserved again for married couples or couples that lived together. Our last name here is for our Captain Raymond Holt and his husband Dr. Kevin Costner. These are characters from Brooklyn Nine-Nine another amazing show, if you can tell, I love comedies. I think what all of these are from accept Peaky Blinders. For this one actually it's pretty much already written. We've got Captain Raymond Holt and Dr. Kevin Costner. Now, that we have our addresses all completed, we can go ahead and export our address book. In this case, I'm going to keep everybody on this list. I'm not going to sort by friends or family. I'm just going to keep everyone. These invites are going out to everybody. I'm going to go ahead and download as an Excel document, you can also do a CSV, if you would like. That's downloaded. Now, I'm going to head over to Word. Let me actually pull back here. The reason that we're going to format this in Word now you might be thinking, well, we just did all this. Why are we go to Word now? That's because while this is great for sorting and maintaining your addresses. It's not so great for scripting envelopes. The reason is, it's really easy to jump from one line to another line and not even realize you've done it until you go back to review and realize you've made a terrible mistake. We want to make it so that it's easy for us to script by putting it in the Word document. There won't be any confusing those lines. It also will help us when we're trying to keep our addresses centered. Open up your Word document, then you're going to go to mailings. We are going to do a mail merge. You're going to go to start mail merge, there's a little arrow there, and we're going to click labels. The reason that I like doing labels is because we can fit a lot of addresses on one page. First thing you want to do is to make sure that you've got the correct printer thing selected. Sometimes for some reason it always goes to CD/DVD. I'm not totally sure why? Then you're going to select the kind of label. I always do 30 per page. I find that that's a good amount and it gives me within a good sized address. Once you've selected that, it's going to be in labels, you're going to select recipients. We're going go ahead and use an existing list. I'm going to head over to my downloads and I'm going to pull up the address book that I just downloaded. I'm going to mark here that my first row has headers because I don't want those to get in the middle of all my data. I'm going to mark that. Click Okay. All right. Now it's got all of the labels. You can start to see where it's just saving their spaces. Now, I'm going to select address block. This is going to be the best way to sort and view all your addresses. You can see a preview here. What we want to do is match fields. You're going to click match fields and then you're going to go through here and match the column names from your spreadsheet to what you need for the address blog. Now, you'll notice that they've got first and last name here. Another reason that we don't do that in our spreadsheet is that a lot of our cards are going to be going to couples or families, so it's going to be difficult if not everybody has the same last name. We're going to change last name to not matched, and we are going to put the name for first name. You'll want to choose between the formal name and just the casual, informal name. I am going to go within informal. Because we're going to say that this is for an invitation to Binge Watch Game of Thrones ahead of the premiere of the final season. I know the dates, that's a little bit, but I'm really excited for this final season. Now, you're going to go through and make sure everything else is matched up. We don't have a last name, that's not matched. We don't have a suffix and we don't have company. Now, if you were making this mailing list for clients or to send out notes to clients, you can absolutely add that as a column, but for our purposes, we didn't need it. Then address line one, two city, state, zip and country all automatically lined up. That's great. I'm going to go ahead and click Okay. You can see that that bumped that back because it got rid of that extra space that was there between the first and last name. That's good. We've got what we want there. Perfect. Now, I'm going to match fields. Oops, I just did that, membrane. Sorry. I'm going to quickly click Okay. All right. So you see that updated, the one there we want to update all of them, so you're going to click update labels. You'll see that that updated everything. Now, we're going to click finish and merge. Then edit individual documents, all. Now it is thinking, thinking, there it is. Here are all of our addresses. Now, we just need to make a few more little tweaks and we will be all ready to print out and start addressing. The first thing that I usually do is highlight everything, get rid of the spacing, I don't want that in there, syncing in me up, and then I center everything. This is again going to make it really easy later on when you are trying to address your invitations. You can take a look at where things sit. For example, if I was able to fit this whole name, this whole first line on one line, then when I go to do the second line, I know, to keep it centered, I need to start at around the ampersand and I need to end at around the e and the r rather in Meyer. That can really help you when you are scripting. Now, there's a couple more things that we need to do before we're ready to go. First, as you want to check for anything like this, these little errors that you might have, that happens because we have added an extra line in our Excel document, so I just delete it and then hit Enter to put that on a separate line. Now, the next thing we want to look at is we want to make sure that all of the names, if we think that they're going to be too long, but we're going to go ahead and pop one onto a lower line. When I'm looking at these, I'm seeing that this name is probably going to be too long. That makes it look, I mean, we could squeeze it all in but then it will be a little top heavy. Because these are so short and this is so long. I'm just going to go ahead and knock that down to a different row. Same thing here with Raymond and Kevin. Now that looks good. Now, the next thing that you need to think about is for all of those folks who you're sending to outside the United States. Because different countries right their addresses out in different ways. You want to make sure that yours is scripted correctly. I want to go ahead and say that I don't have the answers for every single country in the world, but there is an amazing website, amazing resource rather from Columbia University, they have got the addressing standards for, if not every country, then most of them. It's great. I will provide that in the resources section of class. But here's a couple of things, a couple of common ones rather. In most of Europe including France here, the general rule that you're going to follow is that the postal code comes before the city. You'll see that this actually went ahead and automatically did that for me here in Word. Usually it doesn't do that, so that's a nice, it's sort of big. But you do want to double check it to make sure that it is in the correct order. But that being said in the UK, it is different. In the UK, you have the city and then the postal code, and they should go on one line. I'm just going to adjust that to keep those all on the same line there. Then you might notice some small things like there's a little spacing issue there. But other than that, we look good to go. Once you have it all ready, you are going to print this out. In the next lesson, we're going to learn more about postal rules and regulations, which I know is super, super-duper fun. Then we will use this sheet to start actually scripting your envelopes. I will see you guys there. 5. Post Office Rules & Regulations: The last thing we need to discuss before we put pen to paper is admittedly not the most exciting thing we're going to be discussing today, but it is very important, and that's postal rules and regulations. Now this is important because we want to make sure that all the hard work that we just did, isn't sent back to us because we didn't include the proper information or the right amount of postage. I'm going to go ahead and discuss some of the common issues that people have when they're sending their calligraphy envelopes. Now one thing to note is that this section is geared toward folks in the US. If you are located outside the US, you'll want to check with your postal service to see what is required. Now we have discussed what is needed for an address in our last video, but just as a quick refresh, all of your envelopes need to have a name. They need to have a street address. If they're in an apartment, they need the apartment number as well. Then they need to have the city state if they're in the US province, if they're in other parts of the world and a zip code. Now you already know that if they're in a different country, some of those might be swapped around. You'll just need to make sure that you're doing what's correct for the country you're sending it to. Then if it is outside the US, you're going to have the country listed below. Now one other thing that you're going to need on your envelope is a return address. Now this is really important because if you don't have the return address and for some reason your cards not deliverable, then it will come back to you and you will never know that it didn't make it. So now the post-office says to put your return address in the top left corner on the front of the envelope. I never do that. I never put my return address there. I always put my return address on the back flap. This one doesn't have one yet, but we'll be getting to that. Post-office says one thing, I have never knock on wood, had issues with the return address on the back, but again, you just need to make sure that it is on there. I want to set my due diligence and let you know that they do say this is where it's supposed to be. Now, another big question that I get is about postage. Like how do I know how much postage it's going to be required on my card. I'm going to demystify that a little bit for you here. The first thing you need to think about is whether your card is machinable or non-machinable. Machinable simply means that the card can fit through and can be read by the equipment at the post office that they use for sorting. It's actually a very cool piece of equipment, but your envelope has to meet certain qualifications to be able to go through it. If it doesn't, then it's called non-machinable and non-machinable envelopes have an extra charge. To be machinable, your envelope needs to meet a few qualifications. First, it cannot be any smaller than three and a half by five inches, and it can't be any larger than six and an eighth inch by 11.5 inches. That's a pretty big envelopes. Unless you're sending like a novelty greeting card, you're probably not much of an issue there. It also cannot be more than a quarter inch thick, and it has to have the address written horizontally. It can't be just across the envelope. It can't be written on the short side. If it's written on the short side, that'll make it non machine-readable. Another really important factor is it needs to be rectangular. If you have square envelopes, those do not fit in the machine, even if they are the correct size, those will not work in the machine, and so they are non-machinable and will require an extra fee. Non-machinable, your envelope is non-machinable if, as I have just mentioned, it's a square or it's any other shape other than a rectangle. It's also non-machinable if it's larger or smaller than what is required. It's also non-machinable if the address is written along the short side instead of horizontally across the envelope. It's also non-machinable if it's more than a quarter inch thick or if the thickness is uneven, say you've stuck a key in the envelope or something like that and it has a bumpy surface that also makes it non-machinable. If you have a wax seal, or string, or a clasps on the back, that also makes it non-machinable. Another common thing is if it's too rigid. Now, when I say too rigid, I mean there's no good at all. Some folks will get wooden laser cut wedding invitations. That would definitely be too rigid. If your card is like a thick card stock, that's not what they mean by that. They mean like not bendable at all. That's what's non-machinable. Now, a lot of folks will ask me if putting calligraphy on the envelope makes it non-machinable. It doesn't, that in and of itself does not make it non-machinable. You want to make sure of course, that your work is legible, but as long as you are following those other requirements, having calligraphy isn't going to be enough to give you an extra charge. Now, in terms of postage, if your envelope is machinable, meets those qualifications, and it weighs less than one ounce, then that's going to be one forever postage stamp. If it's going from the US to the US, machinable, and weighs less than one ounce. If it's machinable, weighs less than one ounce, and is going from the US internationally, it requires one global forever stamp. Now a global forever stamp might be something you don't have laying around. As of today, which is an end of January 2019, the global postage stamp, it costs a $1.15. You just want to make sure that the postage stamp to do have added up to a $1.15. Now, again, double-check because the prices are changing all the time. You want to make sure that you have enough stamps on there to get your letter where it's going. Now, if your card or invitation or whatever you're sending weighs more than one ounce, then you're going to need additional postage. How do you know that weighs more than one ounce? because I'm guessing you don't have a very highly sensitive postal scale at your home. Maybe you do, but I'm guessing you don't. A good rule of thumb is if you're sending a regular letter or a greeting card, those are going to be below one ounce. I can't even think of an instance where it would be more, I guess, if the greeting card was made of wood or some other material, but the most part those are going to be less than one ounce, so we'll just require the regular postage, assuming it's machinable. To find out if it's more than one ounce, go to the post office. This is especially true if you're going to be sending lots of envelopes at a time, you do not want to assume you know the postage and then it's just a little bit over an ounce and they all come returned back to you. You definitely don't want that. If you suspect your card or envelope is more than one ounce, take it to the post office. They'll wait for you. They'll tell you exactly how much it costs. That's also a good rule of thumb if there's something on your envelope that makes it non-machinable. They can look at it, they can weigh it, measure it, and tell you exactly the amount of postage. Now, one note about vintage stamps that's been very trendy right now, using a bunch of vintage stamps at the top of your envelope instead of the one forever stamp. Totally fine. I love this trend. I love all things vintage. I think it's very, very cool. But again, you just want to make sure you have the right amount of postage. When in doubt, take it to the post office, they're all very, very nice there. They will weigh it, they will take a look at it, measure it, tell you exactly what it's going to cost. When you go to drop off all of the envelopes you've lovingly scripted, you will have confidence that they are going to make it to their destination. Those are some of the postal rules and requirements. Up next we're going to get into the fun stuff. It's time to start scripting. See you there. 6. Basic Layouts, Part 1: Hi, everyone. We are finally ready to start scripting our envelopes. Hurrah. In this video, we are going to discuss how to do some basic layouts with your calligraphy on your envelope. By basic, what I mean is we are going to keep all of our lines on a straight horizontal line that's going to be parallel to the top and bottom here. In our first example of a basic layout, we want to keep all of the words pretty evenly spaced and evenly sized. If you take a look at this, you can see that the lines are evenly spaced out and even though we have super funs, staggered baseline here, you can see that the letters are pretty proportional to one another from line to line. There's not one line that's much, much larger or one line that's much, much smaller. They're all evenly sized in proportion with one another. That's what we're going to do for our very first envelope. Before we get started, you want to grab your address list, and you want to make sure that you know how many lines you're going to need before we start drawing out our guidelines. you can see that we go from the smallest address being three lines, and this is the minimum, because you're going to need a name, street address, and then the city line, which is the city State, if that's applicable to your country, and the zip code. Now, we can go up to five lines. In this example here, we have five lines that it spans. Now, you can technically go longer than five lines. In my calligraphy career, I've done this maybe once or twice on a client's request, but honestly at that after five lines it starts to get very, very crowded. Generally, you can combine lines to compress everything and make it a little bit more manageable to read. Let's say we wanted to compress this one, and let's say it went beyond five lines. Some of the things that you could do to compress or to pull the apartment number up to the address line, so you just separate them by a comma. We could also, if it's a family where there's lots of kids and that's why we have so many lines, you can also just make it the Belcher family. If they all share the same last name. Those are just a couple small things that you can do to condense if you find that there you're having more than five lines. Now, we're going to go ahead and do our first envelope to Dinesh out in Palo Alto. For Dinesh, we see that we have three lines here. For the first method, I'm going to show you of aligning the envelopes. What we're going to do is just take our pencil and lightly draw evenly spaced straight lines across. Now, once you get going and you have a better sense of your spacing and what you want it to look like, you can just go for it and start using your ruler to draw up these lines. But for our first one, we're going to do a little bit of math, a little bit of measuring, so that we can pick the optimal line size here. As I said before, for this envelope, we want all of the letters to be about the same size. We want the lines to be proportional to one another. We don't want one that's super big or one that is super small. In order to do that, we need our longest line. We need to use the longest line to judge the size of the others and here's why. With our longest line, that's going to be the one that's going to need to be the smallest in terms of size of the letters, right? Because if we were just writing Dinesh Chugtai up here, we could make that really big, right? We could make that really, really big. We wouldn't need to compress it at all. But when we go down to this Palo Alto line, if we try to make it the same size that we made Dinesh, we are going to be running off our envelope before we even finished the word California, right? That's why we want to make sure that we're sizing based according to our longest line, which will be our smallest letter. Once you get better at this and you've practiced it a lot and you've done a lot of envelopes, you're going to be able to pretty much eyeball something and see. I see the size of this in relation to the others and you will have a pretty good idea about how you should space out your lines, and how larger letters can be. But in the beginning here, we are going to do a little bit of practice. Here's how I recommend you do that. I recommend you get a piece of paper and then measure out the width of your envelope. There we've measured out the width, and then you're going to practice writing out the longest line. We're going to see how small we need to make our letters in order to fit on this width. Again, remember that I do this for a living and I do it literally every day, so I can get this on my first try. If it takes you a few tries to get it to fit, that's totally fine. That's why we are practicing. Once you have the line written out and you are satisfied with the size of that, I'll pull out my ruler here, you are going to measure the average size of your tallest letters here. It looks like mine are about three quarters of an inch tall. That means that all of my lines need to be at least three quarters of an inch tall. Now, I want to give my lines a little bit of extra breathing room, right? I don't want them to be so close to one another that if I've got a descender here that it's going to run into the l of my Palo Alto there. I'm going to actually bump up my line to an inch. The letters are three-quarters of an inch and I'm going to bump up my line height to one inch. Now, you can make that decision on your own about how much space you want in-between each line. I think a quarter inches is pretty good. That's usually what I do. Now, my alphabets are mostly all staggered baselines because I really liked that look, right? That's another reason I like to have a little bit of extra there, so that if I want to bump things up and play with some flourishes and swashes, I have room to do that. Now I know my lines need to be an inch in height, so I'm going to pull my envelope out. Now, before you put down pen to paper, flip your envelope over and make sure it's the right way up, right? You want to make sure the flap is at the top. Otherwise you could start scripting and end up with an upside down envelope, and I'm not saying I've done that, but I have done that. I have done that so many times, and it's such a huge bummer. Always be sure to check. Now, I'm going to be putting my guidelines down in pencil. I'm going to be making my marks pretty dark so that you can see them here in the video. But when you're making your marks, you want to make them very faint and light. Because remember, you're going to be erasing these later. If you make them too dark you're going to need to use so much pressure with your eraser that you could end up fading some of the ink from your brush marker, so light as you can. I'm just going to make a mark here about the size of a stamp so I remember not to get anything in the way there. I'm also going to make a little mark down here. When your envelope goes to the post office, they stamp a little bar code on it and it's about this height. Now, if you have some letters or your zip code that dips into here, it's not a huge deal, but again, we don't want anything to mar our beautiful calligraphy. I'm just going to make sure that I don't get much, if anything, in that space at all. Now, we can start drawing our guidelines. I like to use a t square, you don't have to. You can use a regular ruler, but this just ensures that your lines are actually horizontal. If you're just using a ruler, you might end up tilting it a little bit so the t square can help. I'm going to mark where the top of my line and where I don't want it to cross. I want to make sure I've got at least this much space up top. I'm just going to mark that there so I don't go beyond it. Now, I'm going to mark my lines an inch apart. Again, that's based on what we've practiced there with our city line being so long. That's how we came to one inch. I've got those drawn on and now I can start scripting my envelopes. Now, your first line is going to be the line from which everything else is centered. If you're nervous about making sure this is centered, you can of course, always do some measurements. Sometimes what I will do is I will mark halfway and then I'll mark it into quarters, and that helps me judge where I'm at. We're looking pretty good on our first line there. Now for our second line, one of the reasons that we've formatted our addresses this way is that we can use this to help us center the rest of our address. I can take a look here and see that the zero in 40 should be about under the d, the a in way should be about under the i. You see here we have our final address. It's looking pretty good. Everything looks pretty centered. I started this just a little bit too inward, so you can see that even though the spacing over here is pretty equal because of how it lines up with this top line, it makes it look a little bit off. Here's a little trick, if it ever looks a little bit off, just add a little flourish or a little doodle and it can help offset everything. There we go. That looks much better and it's got a little heart there, so Dinesh knows my true feelings. This is a great example of a standard basic layout. You can see even though it's a basic layout, what that does is it puts all the attention on the calligraphy, so you have your primary focus on your lovely, lovely calligraphy. Just because you're not doing lots of loops with your lettering or with your lines rather because you're not doing a lot of curves and extra flourishes doesn't mean that it's not interesting and beautiful. Now, if you are doing a bunch of these envelopes and you were like, do I seriously have two draw guidelines and erase, every single one. Well, I might have a trick for you, this trick will only work if you are using a white envelope that is pretty transparent. It doesn't need to be like totally see-through like vellum, but it can't be a super thick card stock. Now what we're going to do is make a template that we can slide in our envelope and we'll be able to see the lines shining through. I would recommend not doing this until after you've done a couple of envelopes and you know about the size of your lines. We've done this one. We were pretty good with an inch of our lines being an inch thick. We are going to make our little template with lines that are an inch thick. I'm just going to grab a piece of paper that would fit in the envelope. One thing you can do is if you're sending out invitations or thank you cards, just get one of the extra cards you have, cut it in half, so that it's just one card. On the back where it's blank, you can do this on there. You can go ahead and cut out paper too, but I'm trying to save you time people, I know you're busy. We're going to go ahead and draw lines every inch. I'm not going to worry about where I start because we can shift this card in the envelope, however we need to depending on how many lines we need. If we need four lines, we can shift it up or down accordingly. I'm going to get a black marker and I'm going to draw out my lines. I went a little off the rails at the end there, but I can tell where it needs to be. Now I have my white envelope, going to slide this in. Boy, I'm struggling, there we go. You can see that you can see these lines through, so you could script and then you don't need to write down every single line and then erase it at the end. Now this is only going to work as I said, if you have a light envelope or if you have a white envelope that is pretty transparent and you'll see here, we can adjust the card, we can pull it up or down depending on how many lines we need to actually do. Now, this sizing, this one-inch, that was really great for an address with only three lines. But you might want to make a couple of these templates, so that if you had one that was, more than that, you have smaller lines. If you plan on doing a lot of five by seven envelopes, again, that's pretty much the standard. It's not a bad idea to have several of these little templates on hand in different sizes. Then you could just keep them with your pens. I'm going to make a mark on this, but this is a one inch line and then so you could just note how thick the lines are. When you are doing your envelopes, you can flip through the folder that you've got and pick the right one. Now if you do have colored envelopes, all is not lost. You can also invest in the item I showed you in the beginning, which is the slider writer. Slider writer uses a laser and so it can go over any color and make a straight line. You don't have to worry about erasing the lines at the end. If you plan on doing this more than once, I think it's a good investment. Honestly, I love mine if you couldn't tell by when I showed it in a video it's very dirty. Which means it's been very loved and very used. That's definitely something that you can try out. Now for our next little video, I am going to show you how to spice up the basic layout with some changes in sizing. 7. Basic Layouts, Part 2: For our next straight basic layout envelope, we are going to make a big change. Pun intended. We are going to make the name much larger than the rest of our script. In order to do that, we're going to follow the same routine that we did before with just a couple little tweaks. The first thing we want to do is take a look at our address book here and decide who we are going to mail this one to. Let's go ahead and send ours to, will do this one to Lindsay and Tobias. What I'm going to do first is get a piece of scrap paper and I'm going to test this out. Now, again once you have done a few of these, it's going to be very clear how large you need to make your letters, how large you can get away with, but maybe for the first one, you want to do a quick little check. I want my names to be pretty big and you can make a couple of choices here. You can decide to do the first name and last name very large, you can also just do the first name with the last name smaller or the inverse to the first name small and the last name large. In the resources section of class, I have included a link to a Pinterest board with so much inspiration from lots and lots of amazing calligraphers. You can take a look and see how they play with size especially when it comes to name. But for ours here well, I would like to have the first and last names the larger size. I want to make sure here, then I'm not going too large. That seems like a pretty good size and still gives me some room below to script the address. Now, I did this high because this is just for practice but but again, you'd want to make sure that you leave room for a stamp. But if you're just practicing on scrap paper it doesn't matter. Now I'm going to grab my envelope. Now, I know because I am doing the name larger and actually going to end up being in four lines instead of three. I need to consider that as I am drawing my guidelines here. I skipped a step there. What I'm going to do first is I'm going to measure out these letters and see just about how tall they are at their tallest. These are about three quarters of an inch tall at their tallest, I want to make sure that I've got three quarters of an inch to spare. I'm drawing a little line there just to let me know where my stamp is going to be and actually I'm going to come down and inch here just to be safe, and then I'm going to mark my next line at another inch. Again just to give me a little bit of wiggle room. These lines that I'm drawing, these are just for the name. I have done a little test on a scrap piece of paper, I see about how large I can make my letters and they will still stay on the envelope. Because with the name, you really can make it as large as you want, as long as it fits on the envelope and then you have some room below here for the address. We'll go ahead and script out our name line. Then now that I have my name written down, I do need to do a little bit of math here to figure out how much space I have left and how to evenly space out my remaining lines. We know we have two lines left, we have the street line and the city line and we want to leave a little bit of space at the bottom here. I'd say we've got about one and half inches to play with in here. One and half inches divided by two is three quarters. I've matched that out and I'm going to draw my straight lines. You can see why I recommend using a T square if you've got one, because it just makes it go a lot quicker. You don't have to go to the end and make sure that your ruler is laying correctly because you can just flood it up against the edge, and then you'll know it is horizontal. Now I've got these lines scripted out and I can go ahead and start doing my envelope the rest of the lines rather. There we go. Now, you may notice I made a little change there and as I started scripting, I realized I was just off. I was going to run off to the edge. Now, if this were a [inaudible] card, I would stop, toss it and start over to make sure I can fit the word California on there as they requested. But because it is a personal card and I don't think Lindsay and Tobias would mind, I just went ahead and shortened it to CA. Oops it kicked the stamp, sorry about that. You're not always going to be able to make that change, but when you can it's fine again. Do not ever do this for a client, if they ask for the full name, you need to write out the full name. But if it's for your personal envelopes and you need to make a choice, go ahead and abbreviate the state, that is totally fine. Another thing that you can do with the straight lines that can make your invitation a little bit more unique in addition to changing the size up, is you can change up the style. In this example here, you can see that the names are all scripted. We've got the parents names, the kids names here and then the address is done in a block lettering style. This can be another way to add some interests to your envelopes that are going straight across. Like I said, if you haven't already, I would highly recommend taking that develop your own style class where you can learn about developing your own styles and how to mix them up a little bit. In the next lessons, we are going to learn about scripting our envelopes on a curve. See you there. 8. Curved Layouts: Hey guys, in this video, we're going to be learning how to script our envelopes on a curve. Okay? Scripting your lines on a curve can give your envelope are really cool sense of movement, gives it some very dynamic energy and it can just add even more interest to your already beautiful envelopes. Let's go ahead and get started. Grab your envelope or your practice paper. Again, make sure it's the right side up. I know I keep harping on this, but it's a huge bummer when you make a mistake like that. Okay, first we need to decide who we are going to be sending our letter to. Let's go ahead and let's send our letter to Raymond Holt and Kevin Costner from Brooklyn 99. That sounds good to me. We know that we're going to need four lines here, our widest line is going to be Brooklyn, New York. We can adjust accordingly there. Now, if you want to go ahead and script to the longest line out like we did with the straight lines, you can definitely do that as a practice. I am going to go ahead and jump right in. Of course you want to note where your stamp is going to be. Again, after a while, you're not going to need to do this. Now, what we're going to do is draw our first curve and then every line under that is going to follow that curve. It's really important that for your first one is angle the way that you want it. That being said, it doesn't have to follow any rule. You can go down and up and down and up. You can just do one little slight curve, you can make one very dramatic curve. We're going to do just halfway between slight and dramatic. I always like to dip mine under the stamp. Just because that gives me a little bit of extra room. Up here I'm going to be obviously a little higher. If I were doing vintage stamps, I would run into them, but since I'm not, I will be okay there. Okay, if that's going to be my first line, let's see how much space I have. I've got about three inches at my lowest point, we need three more lines. Let's go ahead and make our lines three-quarters of an inch apart. Okay, I'm just going to go down the line here at different points and mark off three quarters. Now, this doesn't need to be precise, you don't have to move exactly a half an inch from the line or horizontally, make marks every half inch. You just need to make enough marks that you can get a cohesive line that follows that curve. You definitely want to do more than a couple lines, but you don't have to do quite as many as I'm doing if you think you've got a pretty good handle on it. Once you have your marks, you can go ahead and start to lay down your other lines just following that curve. Now, remember you want your lines to be pretty light because we are going to be erasing these at the end. If it doesn't end up matching up exactly, it's not a huge deal. But you can see here that we've done a pretty good job, these spaces are pretty even. We're going to grab our address here, we're doing Captain Holt and Kevin Costner. Great names. I'm going to go ahead and start scripting. Okay, I have the names written. I made a little mistake there. I wrote down his nickname Ray, that's what everybody calls him on the show. Now again, if I was doing this for a client, I would definitely toss this and do it again, but because this is to my good friend Ray, I'm just going to go ahead and leave that there and move on. Now, I am going to again use my address that I've centered here to make some decisions about where to start my next line. That looks pretty good, I really liked the way that, that turned out. That's a pretty dramatic curve there, but I like it. Now, one thing you may have noted as I was going through this is that you saw me adjusting the envelope as I went. That's because I want it to look like it follows that curve with the direction of the letters as well, that's why I was making those adjustments as I went. If you are just interested in the bottoms being at the curve and you don't mind if your letters go every which way. If you're doing more of a funky modern style, that's totally fine too. Now, if you're doing hundreds and hundreds of these, this is going to be a real pain, not only to draw out every time, but also to erase at the end. If you do want to do one of these and you have a lot of invitations to send, I would recommend making your template. Just like we made a template for our straight line, let me pull that up there. Well, it's here in my mess somewhere. You remember the template we made for the straight line. Just like we did that, we can do that with the curved lines following the same technique that we use to line that envelope. Again, I would recommend doing one first so you can see how you want it to look. Then you would measure from there and put everything down in black ink. I just eyeballed that, I didn't measure it. If you want it to be precise, then you should definitely measure. This would be a nice little template. Again, this will only work if you are using a white envelope that is fairly transparent, or at least not too thick. If you're using a colored envelope or a super-duper thick white envelope, unfortunately, this isn't going to work for you. But if it does work, I highly recommend it because it will save you a lot of time. Now, just like with our straight lines, you can also change up the look of your curved lines by having a little bit of fun with the sizing. Maybe making the names just slightly bigger. You can see how it bounces along that curve. You can also make it a little bit more dramatically bigger like this and mix in some styles. I absolutely love the way block lettering looks in these curved lines because you can really see the curve. Sometimes with the calligraphy, especially if you're doing a staggered baseline, like I like to do. Like I've done here, the curve isn't quite as dramatic, but when you add this to it, you can really, really see that nice curve. You can also add in some other little elements to highlight that curve. For this, I offset the address in a thick and thin line. I just did a horizontal pull on my pen there and then made the ZIP code a little larger at the bottom, adding in that curve. Feel free to experiment here and see what you can come up with. 9. Adding Color: Part 1: This next section we are going to talk about how to use color in our brush calligraphy to really make our envelopes pop and add another level of interest to them. There's lots and lots of ways to add color to your envelope, the first and probably the most obvious way is to have different colored brush pens. My two favorite go tos for brush pens when I want to use a lot of color are the Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush pens. Let me pull one out for you to see. These come in a wide variety of colors, I have them in just about every color they make. This is definitely a good choice if you want to use a lot of colors. Another good choice is the Tombow Dual-tipped Brush Pen. These come in tons and tons of colors. While you don't have the full range that you would have if you were mixing ink, you certainly aren't limited to just black, gray, primary colors. There are lots and lots of options out there. But before we get into all the options for doing color on white, I do want to talk a little bit about doing brush markered on colored envelopes. As we mentioned before, most brush markers, including the Faber-Castell and the Tombow, are not opaque. Color is going to shine through. When you're using black for the most part, that doesn't matter unless the envelope is super, super dark. If the envelope is super, super dark, like say it's black, what are you going to do since you don't have an opaque brush marker? Even though I haven't found a good truly opaque brush marker, I have found that a lot of metallic brush markers are in fact, not totally opaque, but they're opaque enough that they can be seen on dark envelopes. My favorite are the Zig Kuretake Metallic Pens. Let me show you how these write. You can see this has a really nice sheen to it and they come in not a ton of colors, but the set that I have came in green, purple, blue, gold, and silver. I'm sure there are more out there. But you can see the black does shine through but it is still very, very legible and it gives it a really cool look. I like to do this look especially for New Year's Eve where also you want to add a little bit of shimmer to it, that can be really, really fun. If you want to do white ink, you are going to have to stick with a paintbrush with bristles and dipping that in white ink, or go to pointed pen white ink. If there is a brush pen out there that does quality opaque white ink, I have not found it yet, if you have found it, please, please post it in the comments and I'll add a little annotation to this video to say, "Hey, somebody recommended this" and I'll definitely try it out. I will love to find an opaque white brush pen. But so far all I've found are opaque white bullet tips, or chisel tips, or a paint pens, so that would be super helpful. Getting back to our white envelopes with color; like I said, the easiest way to add color is to just change up the color in our brush markers. Of course, you can just do one color that looks really cool. I do one color a lot for wedding invitations. Specifically, this blue is actually a super popular blue right now because of the nautical theme weddings, this has been a really hot color right now. You can certainly just do one color. But if you want to add a little bit more oomph to it, you can actually do a gradation of colors. Again, you don't have the range that you would if you were using deep ink or if you were using watercolor, but you still can get a pretty solid graded look. To get this look, you need to first identify how many lines you're going to need and then you want to pick pens in that many colors. If you need three lines, you need three colors, four lines, four colors, etc. You want to make sure that those colors are close together on the color wheel. Again, we're not going to have super smooth transitions because in this technique, we're not going to be blending like you would with a watercolor, but you can still get pretty close to get that nice graded and look. We are going to do an envelope for Catherine and Marjorie, we haven't done one for them yet. These envelopes had very cool colors an oceany feel. For this envelope, I'm going to do warm colors. These are the four that I have picked because again we have four lines. You can see that again, it's not going to be a super smooth transition, but they're all spaced out pretty much the same on the color wheel. We wouldn't want to go straight from this red into this orange, into this yellow, because these two are a lot closer together on the wheel than these two are, so just do your best. Again when you're sending these to family and friends, chances are people aren't going to be like, "Well, that's a little step too far on the color wheel." I don't know your family and friends, maybe they're like that, but hopefully not and hopefully they're just thrilled to get this beautiful envelope from you. Now we all know how to align our envelopes. I'm not going to go through all that. Instead I'm just going to eyeball this. Now one note about the Tombows is they are pretty large. You do want to be careful. It's really easy to make your letters far too large, so you just want to watch out for that. I'm going to eyeball this and then we'll take a look at what it looks like at the end. If you take a look at this here you can see that we have a really nice gradation from this pinky magenta color into all the way down to this bright yellow. I really like that, I think that looks really lovely and if you were to pair this with a brightly colored stamp, that would look really great too. You can see that even though you're not going to get the super smooth transitions that you would with deep ink or watercolor, you can still get something that goes in that same vein. 10. Adding Color: Part 2: In this section, we are going to talk about blending your colors. Now, you can do this with your fabric crystal or favorite brush markers. But I will say that in my opinion, the [inaudible] work a little bit better for this than the fabric crystals. I do love the fabric crystals, but like I said for blending, these pens just work a little bit better. Now, if you take a look at this example here, you can see that it really looks like watercolor. The way that we achieve that look is by getting two different pens that have the same hue but have different levels of saturation. Okay, so by blending those together, we get the watercolor look. If you take a look at this, you can see where it's dark and then it sort of fades out. Just like as if our brush, we're running out of paint. I'm going to show you how to make this look. The first thing you need to do is again, you need to pick some pens that are the same hue but have different levels of saturation. For this example, I used these two here; 636 and 603 for the lighter one. We're going to test one out using these two colors. You're going to want to grab your envelope. Then in addition to that, you're going to need a piece of plastic. You can use a Ziploc bag, and this is the sleeve for a greeting card, but any kind of piece of plastic will do. You can also purchase blending paper that's made just for these pens. I'm sure there are lots of benefits to using that paper, but I've found that for my purposes, this works just as well, and you probably have it lying around the house all ready. You don't need to go out and make another purchase. To get this effect, we are going to take our dark color and we are going to lay it down on a piece of plastic. You're going to notice that the ink is sort of bawling up on the surface. That's exactly what we want. Now you're going to take your lighter color, and you are going to use it to pick up this darker color. So you just want to get a little bit of that ink on your pen. Then you're going to start scripting. We're going to send this one to our friends, the Belcher family from Bob's Burgers. We're going to say this is an inner envelope. We're just going to do their names. You can see all ready that we have some beautiful variation in color right there at the beginning, and then as that dark ink wears off, we are brought back to our lighter color of the pen that we are using. That gives you a really nice water color look. You're just going to pick up the ink as needed, just like you would with watercolor. I'm going to show you another method to do this that's a little bit more direct. That is you're going to take your darker marker and you're just going to color on your lighter marker. This is going to do the same thing. I found that during this method, your darker color is going to last on here a little bit longer. Now I don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about staining your lighter color. These markers are self-cleaning, which means that the more you script with them, that darker color is eventually going to come off. What we'll do for this last name here, we will just let this color run completely off. You can see by the e there we're getting pretty light. We're getting pretty close to the color of this pen originally. Let's just do a little swash here and there we go. Now we're back to it. You can see that gives it a really lovely watercolor look. Now, another method of blending your colors we can do is creating an amber effect. All right. So, to create an amber effect, I think it's best to do this. It looks best to do this with an envelope where the name is highlighted. The name is going to be just a little larger or a lot larger depending on what you want. It's just about Valentine's day while I'm recording this. I'm going to do this envelope in some shades of pink and red. I've got my lightest shade and then this is the dark shades. I want to go from this color all the way to this one. Now I am going to show you how to do it with just these two. But you can also, if you want the change to be a little bit more gradual, you can pick a mid tone color that will go in there as well. You can see that that's kind of halfway between those two. The first thing you're going to want to do is to script out your name using the lighter color. This name is not on our address list. But I love him and because it's Valentine's day we're going to go with it here. Okay. John Snow, King of the North. Then we're just going to go ahead and script out a quick address here. Now the reason I'm doing this is I want you to see how this looks when you're just doing ombre effect on the name. I know this isn't the correct zip code for London, and I'm not going to put that one up right now. We're just going to pretend. We've got the address written out there, and now we are going to take our dark color and we are going to lay it down on our piece of plastic. Now if you've ever bought a tampon pack, you may have seen something that looks like this. This is called a colorless blender and that's used for blending your colors without adding any color of its own. For this next portion, if you have a colorless blender, you can use that to pick up some of this darker color. If you don't have one of these, it's okay, just use the color that you used here, use your lightest color. Once you have the blender, you have the dark ink picked up, you're going to very lightly start applying it to your letter. You want to do these quick short strokes that's going to help it blend in more. You see that we're only going part of the way down on our letters. Again, we want to make an ombre effect so that's means that we want it to go from darker to lighter. We want to keep the red going, the darker color about the same level all the way across. The reason that we're doing these short strokes is because that's going to give us a better blended effect than if we were to make a hard stopping line. I think I'm going to have to add a little bit more of my darker color, and I go over here and I see you've got a couple edges over here that it'll look in a little hard. I'm just going to use the blender with some small strokes, light strokes to blend that in as we go. Don't worry, we're going to go back and really work on finessing and fine tuning this blend. Now you can use the colors that you're going to use for the ombre, you want them, just like with the watercolor effect, it's going to be best and it's going to give you the most gradual blend if you choose colors that are the same hue, but with different saturations, or colors that are right next to one another on the color wheel. That actually looks pretty good, and you could definitely leave it here to blend out any of those hard edges. We can see there's a couple little hard edges here, and I'm going to take my lightest color and I'm going to drag some of that darker color in. If you want to make it more dramatic, you can take your darkest color and add that to the top. Short strokes, now that's because this is such a dramatic change, it's not going to look very blended at first, we are going to remedy that, don't you worry. Once you get that dark color down, then you're going to take your mid tone and you're going to drag it down. You can see it looks pretty rough right now, and you can leave it if you like the texture, I like the texture that this creates. But if you want something a little bit more smooth, just keep going. Again, we're using this mid tone brush to really pull down that darker color. Then you're going to take your lightest brush and you are going to go over the whole thing, and this we really start to smooth it out. Now I'm doing this pretty quickly, you can see that I'm going a little bit beyond the edges of the letters, you can see where I've messed up there. When you are doing this, I'm moving quickly for the sake of the video here, so we're not going to be here all day. But when you're doing this, you want to make sure that you keep a very close eye on the edge of your letters because otherwise see, I just did there, you're going to end up going outside, and you're going to mess up your effect there. Again, this is really, really rough version. Though, perfectionist in me really wants to scrap this video and start over, but I'm just going to leave it for you to see. You can see that I've really gone outside the lines. Part of it is because I'm reaching so that it is a the video frame here. But again, you just want to be very careful as you go through that. But all that being said, you can see how you do have this really nice gradation as ombre effect. Again, you can do the slight ombre effect that one's going to take a lot less time where we just put the darker color on top with the colorless blender and pull it down. If you want it more dramatic, it's going to take a little bit more finessing, and it's going to really require that you pay close attention and not get way outside the lines, like I did there. 11. Adding Color: Part 3: For our last little foray into adding color with your brush markers, I'm going to talk a little bit about using a paintbrush an actual paintbrush to put down some color in the background of your invite. You can see with this one, I've chosen to do white and then I've scripted over it in a darker pink. If you can see here where the letter actually overlaps the envelope, you can definitely see it but it's close in tone. It'll be difficult to read the whole thing if we put all of this out or anything in the background but I wanted to stick with the pinks and reds theme so, I got my paintbrush and some acrylic waterproof ink and I just added a little bit of brush into the background. This is great if you want to script on colored envelopes and you know your ink is not quite opaque enough to go over it, you can definitely add a little bit of a white or light background to it so that you can write on top of them. That's one way that it can work. Of course the other way, is that you can do this on a white invitation and this paint area can all be in color. Now in this example I have covered the whole area of the address, but let's do one. I've already gone ahead and painted this just so we had time for it to dry. What we're going to do is we're going to script the address here with the name here rather and then the address is going to go below. There's going to be probably a little bit of dip in the address there but the ink that I used for this is spectral light liquid acrylic, 18 karat. This is my go to gold ink. I use this in dip calligraphy all the time. I'm not sure how well it'll translate in the video here but it has a really beautiful sheen to us. So we've added that in the background and I'm just going to show you what it can look like here when we script out our invitation, I'm going to slide my guidelines in here, now you'll notice that you can't really see through there, so if you want to make it perfect you're going to want to draw your pencil line over but you'd need incredibly lightly because when you go to erase, you might actually erase a little bit of this in the background. So now one note on your choice for the ink or paint that you used back here. If you're using this ink, if you erase over it, you're going to be fine. This is liquid acrylic, so it's really tough but if you are using watercolor, when you try to erase your going to end up picking up some of the color, so you do want to be careful about that. Now if you do want to use watercolor for this which can be very beautiful especially, if you want to have a couple colors bleeding into one another, you're going to need to take some precautions before this goes out in the mail. Watercolor is lovely but it doesn't really work in a rainstorm. If your postal carrier gets caught in a rainstorm and it gets wet, it could just bleed everywhere. Now, technically your brush pens could bleed too but it's going to take a little bit more for that to happen. I've never had any trouble with my brush pens bleeding to the point where it's totally ruined the envelope. Sometimes there might be a little smudge here or there unless they're sitting out in the pouring rain, those are going to handle themselves well but watercolor definitely will not. You need something like this. This is a wax glaze. You just take a little bit on your finger after you're all done and you apply it over the watercolor section. This will seal it and doesn't make it like totally waterproof but it does make it pretty resistant to the water so that if it does get wet, it's not going to immediately bleed all over the place. Now, if you aren't a professional calligrapher that needs this, you might not just have this on hand, I'm going to give you a little trick. Another thing you can do for this and I swear it works because I have done it in a pinch, is you get a long white uncentered taper candle and you rub it over top, the wax from the candle will help seal in that water color. That's a little trick for you if you don't have any micro glaze on hand. We've got our paint's watch here, so now we're going to go ahead and script. I'm going to use a black and commonly use my favorite castell, let's go to our addresses, who have we not sent one to? Let's see, we haven't haven't sent one to Madeline yet, we'll go ahead and do hers now. Because I pre-did this I haven't exactly counted my rows correctly. Madeline's address is long, it's a five liner. I'm going to make this one so that her name is highlighted and then we'll do the rest of the address smaller. If you take a look at that you can see that that adds just a little level of interest here to your envelope. Now remember, your brush marker is not totally opaque. You are going to see some of that ink shining through but again, I think it's really cool. It just depends on the what did she want. If you really don't want it shining through like that, a watercolor is probably a better choice, but again this ink because it is acrylic and waterproof, you don't have to worry about sealing this in. That's just another way that you can add color to your envelopes. In our final video, we're going to go over the finishing touches to our lovely envelopes. See you there. 12. Finishing Touches & Your Class Project: Hey everyone. In this last section, we are going to talk about finishing touches to your envelopes, as well as discuss your class project. For the first finishing touch, you want to make sure that you apply a return address to all of your envelopes. As we've already mentioned, the post office suggests putting it in the top left corner, but I never do that. I always put mine on the back of the envelope rather on the flap. Now, you can, of course, use just a sticker here if you would like, but we don't roll that way. We're going to do ours in calligraphy. Now, I am going to be doing a future class that's going to show you a few different ways to turn your calligraphy into a return address that you can use over and over again. But for today, I'm just going to show you how to script it along the back. For the return address, you just need your last name. You don't need to include all of your information. Sometimes, like for example, because my husband and I have different last names, what I will do is I'll just put Kim and Dan. Really the most important thing for the return address is the address. If you can get your last name on there, go for it; if not, don't worry about it. I'm going to take my liner from before and pop it under there. Now you can see that these lines are pretty large, so I'm going to end up needing to make them a little smaller. Again, if this is something that you're planning on doing frequently, I would recommend making a template with lines that are more close together. If you are using a white envelopes, you can script out your return address once, slide it under like the template and then just trace over it. That will help if you're doing a lot of these at a time, and maybe help you keep nice and centered. What we're going to do is again I'm going to put my name, and then I'm going to put an address. Now, you want to remember that because the envelope tapers in that you might end up needing to use more lines than you normally do. Let's say my address is normally three lines. Because we're tapering in like this, I think I'm going to end up needing to bump it up to probably five because we'd have the name, street address, city, state, and then zip code. Now you don't have to do it this way. You can make yours much smaller, again, as long as you have the most important information. You see there I have a nice return address. If you want to fill in some of this empty space, you can do that with some doodles. You could write little phrases, letting folks know where to return. Have some fun with it on the back there. Again, you can create this in the same style that you did on the front of your envelope to give it a little bit more personality. Now, remember too you can also make it much smaller so that you can script it like you would script your standard address. If you're going to make it smaller and still want that calligraphy look, I would recommend the Tambo Fidelis Usque. It is a very fine point and can give you a much smaller letter will still have the nice calligraphy proportions. Like I said, the most important thing is that it's on there because if something happens, you want make sure that it comes back to you, and that it doesn't just get lost in the heat or somewhere. In addition to the return address, you're also going to need a stamp. I absolutely love getting stamps. Every time the post office comes out with a new one, I'm fan girl, and I'm one of the first in line. You can get so many stamps. These are just a few that I had in my stash of Forever Stamps. Remember, if your envelope is machinable, and it weighs less than one ounce, and is going from the US to anywhere within the US, you'll just need one of these stamps to send it. They come out with new stamps all the time. You can get them at the post office, or you can buy them from USPS.com. Like I said, they have so many fun ones. They get different artists and designers to come in. When you're choosing your stamp, have it go with the theme or your color scheme. This stamp would be great on this envelope. I actually bought these in preparation for Valentine's Day, so this would look lovely on a stamp like this. Of course, seasonally, I got my Halloween stamps. They have stamps for all different holidays all over the world, and they are always very fun and festive. Then of course, you have your every day stamps. I would encourage you, instead of going to the grocery store and just buying a roll of the American flag stamps, not that there's anything wrong with those, but you can use the stamp as part of your overall design. Don't be afraid. Don't think that you have to just stick with the plain old American flag stamp. There are so many options. If you can't find them at your post office, like I said, they're all available on USPS.com. Now if you want to design your own stamps, there are websites that allow you to do that. You can do that on Zazzle. I know that is one that I've seen a lot of my brides use. Just know that it is going to be more expensive than regular postage, but it's postage all the same and it will work. If you want to use a photo of yourself or you've designed something that you would like to have on the stamp, that is something you can definitely do. Now, if you want to use vintage stamps, there are tons of great resources for a vintage stamps. I'm going to include those in the resources section of class so you can have a look there. You can with vintage stamps, one fun thing to do is source them in addition to by color like I'm showing you here. You can source them also by theme. You can find lots of different stamps, let's say like they are all birds. Also beautiful paper, the stationery blog, which if you don't follow it, definitely go follow it. Now it's amazing. When one of her children was born, her announcements were vintage stamps and she used all space theme, and they were so cool. Some were like rocket ships, some were planets, and they were all vintage and they paired really lovely together. That's something you can think about with the stamps. Again, let yourself be creative with them, and I think you'll be very impressed with what the post office actually has, especially if you haven't been there in awhile. Now for our class project, I know this is going to come as a huge shock, but you are going to script your own envelopes. Of course, I hope that you will script envelopes to your friends and family, after all, that's what this class is about. But for the class project, because I don't want you sharing your family's addresses online, never a great idea, we are going to mix it up a little bit, and I'm going to ask you to do what I did when we were arranging addresses. I want you to pick some of your favorite fictional characters and write script envelopes to them. Have fun with the address, figuring out what the address might be. I also encourage you to experiment with some of the different techniques that we've done here, including layouts, changing the sizes, working with color, blending. You don't have to apply a stamp, but I would definitely recommend you head over to the post office and check out what they've got for your own friends and family. When you have done this, please take photos and share it in the class project section rather. I cannot wait to see them. In the meantime, if you're on Instagram, would like to share your work, please tag me in it so I can see the lovely work you're doing. I always love to see what students do. My Instagram handle is at @mnykcalligraphy. Go ahead and give me a follow if you haven't already. I just really hope you have enjoyed this class. I have had a ball teaching it. If you can't tell, this is a topic that I am genuinely joyful, excited about. This is my favorite thing I have made in my life. I am so thrilled that there are other people that love it too. I hope that you will get out there, write a bunch of letters, really impress your mail carrier. Again, be sure to share your work so we can all enjoy in its loveliness. Happy scripting.