Time to Write Goodbye

Well everyone, the time has come to officially draw "Calligraphy with Jacqueline" to a close. The blog is now complete in its entirety and it is hard for me to fathom how quickly time has passed between struggling to come up with a genius hour topic, to now where I am done my blog and learned so much about calligraphy! 

Throughout this process, I have learned a lot about myself. Like I have said before, I am by no means an artistic person when it comes to drawing or painting. However, I greatly challenged and invested in myself for this assignment to commit to learning a new skill that I can continue to get better at and practice long after the completion of this project. It showed me that when I put my mind to something, I am able to achieve what I may not have thought was possible and has opened up my ideas of other tasks and skills I would like to try to learn. Another thing that I learned about myself is that I often do not try new things because I do not "have the time", but this project showed me that really all you need is a dedicated hour a week, and once you enjoy something it actually becomes a way to unwind and is meditative just like calligraphy. 

I really enjoyed creating a blog as it is neat for me to be able to go back and see where I started to where I am now. Although a time consuming process, blogging has also been a very enjoyable outlet to write and "talk" to my readers about how I was progressing with my calligraphy (special shoutout to Emily, Rachel, and Alex). 

The most challenging part of learning calligraphy has been taking things slowly and not advancing ahead before I was ready. A graduated system really is required when learning it, and mastering the strokes was essential to my success and understanding of why I was doing what I was doing with each letter. I would change the way in which I interchanged between the different types of pens. I think it probably would have been better if I stuck with the Fudenosuke pen first and mastered writing with that before going to the brush pen since the brush pen requires much larger movements which can then be tricky to scale down. 

From here, I will continue writing different words and begin experimenting with different font styles to make my writing more fun and unique to me. I also intend to learn the uppercase alphabet since I find those letters very difficult and know that it will require a large time commitment, but starting small and breaking up the letters rather than learning them all at once will help me be successful!

 Thank you all for tuning in to my calligraphy journey. I hope you have enjoyed my updates, progress, and learning, and maybe this space has inspired other people to try calligraphy for themselves!

Yours (for the last time) in writing, 

Jacqueline