How to Doing Calligraphy With A Crayola Marker

Hey I'm Becca with The Happy Ever Crafter and in today's video I'm going to show you how you can use those cheap, super easy to find Crayola markers to create really beautiful modern calligraphy. So to demonstrate this I'm going to be obviously using a Crayola marker, this is just a normal Crayola broad tip marker. You can see that it's chiseled. And to demonstrate the difference between that and a brush pen I'm going to be showing you a Tombow dual brush pen as well. And the paper I'm using is called Rhodia, it looks like this and it's just a really nice high quality paper. Using higher quality paper is always a really good idea for your brush pens and I mean if you're using Crayola it's not as big of a deal but it's a good habit to get into using good quality paper for calligraphy. So those are the tools. Now the main difference between using a Crayola versus using a brush pen for calligraphy is that one is flexible, the brush pen, and one is not. The brush pen looks like a brush on the end and if you press light and hard on it you're going to get different effects. So a light line with a brush pen would be thin and a heavy line with a brush pen would be thick. Whereas with a Crayola it's chiseled on the end, it's not a flexible tip. So in order to get those thin and thick lines you actually have to move your hand in a different direction. So you would have a really light line by using the tip of the pen and then you'd have a heavier line by using the side of the pen. So I'm not changing the pressure on my hand, I'm just changing the angle that I'm holding the pen. So that would be the difference between using a brush pen and a Crayola. The nice thing about Crayolas is that they're obviously cheap and a lot of people have them just lying around and you can do calligraphy with them. So let's get into how to actually do that. So just like I showed a minute ago, in calligraphy what you need to remember is that anywhere your pen is moving in an upwards direction is going to be a light line. And anywhere your pen is moving in a downwards direction is going to be a heavy line. So light up and hard down. And that's something that you're generally going to be reminding yourself of as you're doing calligraphy. So the first thing I want you to do is just play with the pen and see what thin and thick lines you can get. So on this first line here, I just want you to go on the tip of your pen and play around with how you hold it. Normally with brush pens you would try and hold it at about a 45 degree angle, but with Crayola markers that means that you're going to get the thick part of the pen. So you actually need to hold it a little bit higher up. And all I want you to do is some nice thin lines. So these are called upstrokes and they would be just touching the paper, not putting pressure on them. And they're going to be slightly curved from the bottom to the top. Nice and slow the whole way. In calligraphy the slower you go the better it'll be. Then once you've done those light upstrokes, I want you to do the opposite. So now you're going to hold your pen at a little bit of a different angle, whatever that means for you. You're going to try and get the belly, the chiseled part of the pen, and get a thicker line. So now you're going to go from the top to the bottom with a thick line. So for me this means holding my pen at slightly less of an angle in order to get the thick part. So that's how you would get your upstrokes and your downstrokes. Now with a Crayola it's actually a little bit trickier than a brush pen when you start to combine these because you have to actually kind of maneuver your hand in a certain way to get the thins and the thicks. Whereas with a brush pen you're keeping the same angle and you're just changing the pressure. So I want you to try a couple of these strokes where you go from light up and then change the angle and go back down thicker. So light up, change the angle, and back down thicker. And you'll notice that mine are even a little bit choppy because it definitely takes some practice to get those thins and thicks with Crayolas. And some of the calligraphy basic strokes are easier than others, but you can see already just after the first three where I had to get a handle on it, they're starting to get a little bit better here. Then once you're comfortable with the light up and hard down, you're going to apply that to words. So again, anywhere your pen is moving in an upwards direction will be light. Anywhere it's moving in a downwards direction would be hard. So let's say we were to write the word high. Now I did that fairly quickly because I'm obviously used to doing this, but if you're a person who's just getting used to doing this, you're going to do it nice and slow because the slower you go, the easier those transitions to thick will be where you're moving your hand. So you can apply this to any kind of writing at all. Even if you're doing block letters, for example, let's say I wanted to write the letter A, you would have a light up and then a hard down and horizontal lines would be thin as well. So literally any kind of writing you can apply this light up hard down rule to. And that means that you can actually just apply it to your regular cursive writing. But you might notice that in this word high, for example, that's broken down into little pieces. You might have seen me lift my hand in between. And so that's the difference between the cursive and calligraphy. So calligraphy is actually broken down into basic strokes. And if you've never heard me talk about that, you can go up to this video here where I go over them. But the more consistent you can get with your calligraphy basic strokes, the more consistent your words and letters in general will be. So definitely take a look at doing the calligraphy basic strokes before you even try and do calligraphy at all. But just keep in mind that you can apply this to any sort of writing. So if you've never learned calligraphy and all you know is cursive, you can totally do that too. So if you enjoyed that video and you're ready to go raid your kids art bins and try out this Crayola calligraphy, make sure you check out this next video as well where I show you how to do the exact same thing but with brush pens. And I'll see you next time.