How To Learn Calligraphy Styles

How to learn calligraphy styles. A better way to ask this question is how to learn a calligraphic hand or how to learn a calligraphic script. I am going to look at a script from the beginning of the middle ages but I am also going to use a color plan, purple because I would like to use some of this shaded script working with gold.

The first thing you need to do when you're going to choose a calligraphic script is look to the historical sourcebooks to see what you can find. There are some brilliant books by lots of authors. There are some very good books which have historical source information, like this book by Christopher DuHammel.

This is a first edition which was one of my early books. The quadrata hand uses a baseline as do all scripts. Line the top of your baseline and we're going to use a big pen to roughly get an x degree.

I'm just doing them in water. I've mixed the Windsor Newton in here with some distilled water. Also, very useful is a syringe so you can control how much water is going in.

Metals are generally more problematic. Always have a separate rag for cleaning your different colors on. So, I'm going to mix a little bit of gum arabic with this to help bind the pigment a little bit better.

Really good tip, use the back of your brush which means keeping your brushes clean. Dip into the gum arabic and it will drop some drops into your pigment. Don't touch the bottom of the brush to the pigment itself.

Make sure you clean it after. Stir the gum arabic and the distilled water in together. Again, have a separate rag specifically for gold or metal.

I generally have a different rag for each color. Notice, this script is a vertical script so the page is perpendicular to where I'm sitting. I am not going to use a reservoir on the back of this nib.

Instead, I'm just going to dip straight from there because metals are much more problematic than ink. So the script is texture, texturalis quadrata. I'm also using pools of ink that I've left on the page.

Another way to do this would actually be to use the brush color on the back of it. That gives you a lot more control. The basis for this script is it is one of the simplest of the scripts to learn.

It has a quadrant which is a square on its side, a lozenge which is an elongated version and a down stroke. And I'm just going to flood a little bit more color in the top bit here which is already dry. This is your simple basic quadrata script.

There are lots of calligraphic hands. This is one of them and only of the ways to start learning calligraphic script. .