Hi everyone! I cannot believe how fast time is flying on this genius project! Last time we chatted, I had been working on learning and practicing the final calligraphy strokes and I am very pleased to say that we have now branched into writing letters. I was able to find helpful YouTube videos which I will link below for you at the end so that you have a reference for what I used to assist my learning. As well, Becca (the online course instructor) provided some snippets of how strokes turn into letters which really helped me.
To start, I wanted to practice the first 13 letters of the alphabet. I figured it was a good way to not bite off more than I can chew, and allowed for me to get maximum repetitions in to connect the strokes in different ways. Since I am now writing letters, I fully understand the difference between cursive and calligraphy from a practical standpoint. When I write in cursive, it is very quick and all connected, whereas with calligraphy the pen is consistently lifting up off the page as it moves to start and end the stroke.
To begin, let's start with the letter 'a'. Please keep in mind I am focusing only on the lowercase alphabet first since that is what all the experts say while doing my research because the lowercase alphabet requires the use of the strokes more heavily than the uppercase alphabet which requires more creativity and practice. There are three strokes that make up the letter 'a'. They are: the upstroke, the oval, and the downstroke/underturn depending on what you like to do with the tail of the a. As you can see in the video below, I demonstrate the way the three strokes come together to form one letter!
Below you can see the first 12 letters of the alphabet. I tried to show you all the way the different strokes come together to form each letter. For this, I used the Tombow Fudenosuke pen as it allows you to really see the difference between the fine and thicker lines. For the letter 'b', it again uses the upstroke, ascending loop, and a partial oval. Of course there are different artistic elements you can add such as the way I looped the end of the b, but if you look closely it still somewhat resembles a soft upstroke. While practicing, I saw that some letters do require you to write without an exact stroke, but since I understand the fundamentals and the amount of pressure I need to put on the pens based on the direction I am travelling on the paper, I would say they all turned out pretty well.
Once I had written all of the letters out individually, I decided to try joining them up. This was one of the most satisfying experiences for me as I really got to see the beauty of calligraphy with all the letters joined together. The only trouble that I had this week was finding the time to practice. There are a lot of moving pieces with school right now, but since I find practicing calligraphy to be therapeutic, I very much enjoyed this next level of writing on my journey. I am very happy with the progress I have made so far with these first thirteen letters, and am excited to complete letters 'n-z' so that I will have the entire lowercase alphabet down! This puts me one step closer to completing my final goal of this project of writing a greeting card.
Well, that's all for now. I hope you have a great week and look forward to updating you in my next post.
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