How To Write Calligraphy

How to write calligraphy. The basic underlying premise of calligraphy is structured around the use of a square edged pen. Now, we also have pointed pen calligraphy that's something completely different.

Most of us script up until the beginning of the 17th century, and well into the 20th century, also used square edge pens. What we're going to start off with, we're going to start off with double pencils because they are the best way for you to understand how a square edge pen works. So, a double pencil is made by taking two pencils, lining up the points on a sheet of paper and banding the back together with some rubber bands.

You can actually use masking tape for this if you want. But you also need to band the front. So, here's the pair.

Work out how high you're actually going to work and I think what we'll do is we'll just work to four. One, two, three, four, so that gives us essentially four nib widths. I'll do this with a pen because it will give you an understanding of actually why we're using these double pencils.

This gives us the proportional height of the letter in relation to the nib. What the double pencil does, it gives us the outside of this square, but not the front and the back edge, leading edge, and the trailing edge. And it doesn't fill the middle in because it doesn't have ink.

It gives us and outline letter which is sometimes a little difficult to understand. But again, it is the best way to look at learning calligraphy and learning how to write calligraphy. I'm going to use four.

I'm just marking that off there and I will mark that off here and I'll do another line. Remember to mark both sides off so you keep a straight line. Be very very careful to be as precise as possible.

Notice I don't just draw with my pencil. I keep my pencil as vertically as possible and I also roll it back and fourth. This keeps an even consistent pencil mark line.

This is a separate sheet of paper. I'm using color plan which is a stock. It is really beautiful to practice on and it's equally beautiful to produce fine art work on.

And I'm using one sheet to write on, but I'm also using a second sheet as a guard sheet. It's called a guard sheet because our hands produce a lot of moisture and oils and if that gets onto the paper, then the ink won't stick on that area where the ink is deposited. So, it helps to have a guard sheet.

It also helps to keep the page clean. So, we're using the double pencils. The whole concept of calligraphy is based upon the angle of these pencils to the baseline.

So, this is your baseline. This is a 90-degree line so a line perpendicular to your baseline roughly 90 degrees and all scripts are based on the angle of the nib to this perpendicular line from the base line. So, we're just working in this particular area.

So, what you want to do is you want to line the pencils up an angle. Choose any angle. Start with something preferably 45 degrees.

And notice I'm going to this and then I lifting my hand off and I'm going to where I want to work. I've kept the angle and then I'm going to move vertically down and I also want to line the points up so they produce one line when they overlap. And that's essentially the principle exercise for learning calligraphy.

Now, all different scripts have different angles. This is just a little over 45. So, this is probably about 40 degrees.

Move the little in. Sketch your angle in or you could use a protractor. So, this is 45 degrees here.

Again, I'm using my arm to make these lines. I'm not using my fingers. And I'm going to flatten the angle a little bit more to about 60 degrees.

The reason for this is I would like you to see how the pencils work in relation to change of the angle. If we look at these three groups, we can see a number of things. Steeper angles mean narrower or thick lines.

As we flatten the angle, the lines get wider. But the distance between the down strokes also decrease. This is esse