Addressing Envelopes in Calligraphy as a Left-Handed Calligrapher

Hello to all my YouTube friends and subscribers. Thank you so much for following along on my journey. I wanted to do a quick video as we're going into Thanksgiving here the next week because people are starting to think about addressing envelopes for holiday cards and so I wanted to give a little quick tutorial on how to best do that. First of all I have my materials here in front of me. I have a couple envelopes for my examples. These exact envelopes are from Paper Source. I have my PH Martens bleed proof white ink. That's the color that I'm going to be using to write in. I have my nib holder and my nib. This is a type of Nikko nib. I will make sure to link it in the comments below if you're interested. I also have a ruler and a pencil because for one of the ways to address the envelopes I'm going to show you how to draw the lines on first and measure everything out. I obviously have my list of addresses. I have three fake addresses that I made up for this tutorial and then some toothpicks as well just because I'm probably going to be storing the ink. Alright so we're going to go ahead and get started with the first example here. If you feel more comfortable drawing your lines for your envelopes then there are a couple ways you can go about it. I've seen some people who draw, this is about halfway through the envelopes if you want to be precise you can measure it out, but I see people draw a line faintly down the middle. You may not be able to see the pencil marks on the camera but in person they do show up pretty well. And then if they want their lines to be, let's say they want their lines to be an inch apart, then they'll mark in the middle where those inch lines are and then they'll go back in and draw the three lines for the envelope address in pencil so they can see exactly where they are going to be addressing. Now this is if you want to be very precise when you center the address of your envelopes and just make sure not to start the lines too close to the top because you do need to leave some room for your stamp. And real quickly another good thing to do as well is to draw a line down the middle of your address. So these letters right here, the U, the P, and the C, you're kind of hoping that those are also going to hit on the middle line that you've drawn on your envelope. Once again this is if you're doing your addressing very precisely and you're centering it. I will also show you a couple styles and options for if you don't want to center your addressing. All right now if you're looking to learn left-handed calligraphy, unfortunately I'm not really teaching the techniques in this video, but I do have other videos that you can take a look at and I will make sure to link them in the comments. So there's Jimmy and looks like we're going to be just about perfect with Lauren. Okay my U is hitting the center line. All right so now we're going to move down to the second line. And as you can see on here the 1507 on the address starts in a little further than the Jimmy. And I all I did was type this up on my computer and center it so that I could see how it would look and how how it would look on the paper and then be able to translate that to how I want it to look on the envelope if I'm going to center it. So put in the 1507. And then my P might not quite be in the middle, but we'll try to get it pretty close. It's just about perfect actually. The middle line is right down through here if you can't see it on the camera. Now the northwest ended up going a little farther on the envelope than it does up here, but that's all right as long as you're not too picky it's still looking pretty darn good so far. You can move on to the third line as well. Starting in Denver a little further in. Perfect I'm starting my C right on that line. And then I'll go ahead and finish up the zip code at the end. So there we have it the first way that you can address an envelope if you want to. And then after you're done with this you just have to go back in and gently use your eraser once the ink is dry to take off the lines that you drew on the envelope. All right now we're going to move on to the second way that you can address an envelope. In this one you don't need your ruler it's not as strict. I'll show you real quick what I do. It's pretty easy I just start the names over here on the left side. This one gives you a little more creative freedom and reign as well. It's just not as strict and rigid as the first example. I'll also go ahead and put Amy's name up here as well. Don't forget all these addresses are fake and they are fake people as well. And I do put pressure on the envelope with my right hand over here just to keep it in its place. And then I'm going to drop down right underneath their name and write their last name. All right so right here we have the first part of their name. Um the first part of the envelope excuse me that is their names David and Amy Hartfield. All right now I'm going to go ahead and do the address and block lettering and if you want to you can use a ruler for this part to make sure that you stay straight. I just put my ruler a little further down than where I'm writing because I don't like my nib running into the ruler edge. So that way it acts as a guideline but you don't have to bump up right against it. Oh no well there you have it. A nice mistake which normally means that I would obviously have to start over if I was doing this professionally but I'm going to continue to show you guys um what the rest of the address would look like. And the Marietta Georgia see how these are centered Marietta is obviously going to have to start out farther than the 35 Elm Road. All right and there you have it. So messy ink blob aside right here in the middle you have your beautiful calligraphy name on the left and your block lettering address down on the right. All right so I'm going to show you one more example which is the freehand version of addressing. So right here when I shine this in the light you can kind of see where I made those pencil lines to do the addressing. I personally can't stand taking the time to erase all of these like it just kind of drives me bonkers. So I have basically developed a way to freehand my envelopes that I feel still looks really great and professional and fun so I'll show you what that looks like. And real quick let me go ahead and say that if you do have something that's written out fully like south that you can abbreviate if you're running out of room then go ahead and do that. But if you're working for a client then you're going to need to make sure that everything is written out how they give it to you. However in this instance these are for my personal use so I can decide what I want to abbreviate and what I want to fully write out. So there you have it that's the final address that I had to write out for this video and instead of trying to keep everything perfectly straight and keep everything perfectly centered I went ahead and just put my writing in a little bit of a slant. I've done this a lot now and so I guess it's almost instinctual that when I have a smaller line of writing with a bigger line of writing I'm starting this in a little further starting this line out a little further starting this Seattle Washington in further because it's shorter. So I think once you do it more often you're going to start getting that feel for kind of like centering with your natural eye instead of always drawing out the lines. Like when I look at these two examples I think I actually prefer the bottom one but that's partly like my preference in my style more than anything instead of having it perfectly straight and perfectly centered. So I'll pull in my last example as well the one with the nice splotch on it but now you have three different ways to address your Christmas greeting card envelopes for the holidays and like I said if you're looking for tips on left-handed calligraphy specifically take a look in the comments I will link my other videos so that you can learn. Thanks so much for joining me today.