Calligraphy Alphabet Breakdown

If you watched my other video recently where I wrote out the whole lowercase alphabet and you ended up feeling a little lost, this is the one you need. Or if you're coming from just trying to learn the modern calligraphy alphabet in general and you're getting stuck and you just don't know what to do, this is for you. In this video I'm going to show you exactly how I break down the modern calligraphy letters and this is exactly how I do it inside my full workbook and my full course. You'll see the strokes that make up each letter, how they fit together, why it's so much easier to learn this way than just trying to copy other people's lettering and so much more. So let's just jump right into it. And don't worry, if you're brand new to all of this I'm going to keep it super beginner friendly. So first off as a quick reminder, this is what the basic strokes look like and you need to keep these in mind as you're making all of your letters. So let's start with the letter A. This is what the letter A is going to look like all put together. But if that feels overwhelming, which it probably does if you've never done this before, let's break it down. So here's how I would do that. First of all, the letter A is built up of upstrokes. So I would do a row of practicing my upstrokes. Hopefully you're doing this along with me. Okay, then it's made up of an oval. So I'm going to do a row of practicing an oval, really remembering how the letter is built up of everything individually and how each piece needs to be as consistent as possible by itself before it can be put into a letter. And again, if you're watching me do even just these pieces and you're like, I don't know how to do those, that's what my free course is for. So I'll link to that down below. But now we've done our upstrokes, we've done our ovals, and now there's an underturn. So let's do a row of underturns, getting our underturns as consistent as possible before we put them into a letter. Not gonna lie to you guys, I've had like six coffees today. So if you're noticing a little shake, that's why. Would not recommend. Okay, so now we have a row of upstrokes, a row of ovals, a row of underturns. Now we're going to put those beside each other, but not quite touching yet. So upstroke, and now I'm going to cut it a little bit early because I know it's going to connect to an oval. And if I do it too tall, it's going to stick out past the oval. These are like little nuance-y things that you learn when you get deeper into this, into the course and the workbook and everything. But for now, just listen to me, cut your upstroke a little bit early. Then I'm going to do my oval, and I messed that one up right away. Okay, and this is why we do this over and over again until we feel confident. It looks like IOU, doesn't it? Okay, so personally, I recommend doing more than just three of those. If you're uncomfortable with this, do it a bunch of times. And then lastly, once we're comfy, we're going to take that upstroke, just touch it together with the oval, and then just touch it together with the underturn. And that's why these basic strokes and getting them so consistent is going to make such a big difference when you're building your letters. So I'm just going to do a couple more A's to really reinforce that. There we go. And you can see that because my strokes are consistent, my letter is consistent. Now let's do that with the letter B. For the letter B, overall, it's going to look like this. Okay, so let's break that down. This one's going to be very, very similar, except as you can probably see immediately, this middle shape is not one of the basic strokes. There are going to be some letters in the alphabet that have some unique extra strokes like this one. So we would have our upstrokes again, do a row of upstrokes. I'm going a little faster than I should here, honestly, because I don't want this video to become super, super long, but slow yourself down. Then we're going to do some ascending loops. And I just, I know I've said this a few times, but I want to really reiterate that if you've never actually learned the basic strokes and you're just trying to copy me right now, you're missing out on a lot of information. There's a lot that goes into how these strokes are actually built and a lot of common beginner mistakes with them. So please, please, please learn these first. There's no excuse because the course for them is free. And again, I'll put that down below, but hit there. So we have our upstroke, our ascending loop, then we're going to do this extra piece, which is not one of the basic strokes, but it does repeat a few times in the lowercase alphabet. So it's kind of like an oval and then your upstroke comes out at the end. If this stroke feels awkward, that's normal. That's why it's really nice to have a workbook with traceables of that, but now let's try doing them consecutively. So we would have our upstroke our ascending loop, and then that last piece again, upstroke. There we go. And again, I'm going too fast, but you can slow it down. You can pause as you need to, to copy along. Okay. And then putting them all together, upstroke, ascending loop comes down there through the middle and that last piece. And there you have it, the letter B. We're going to do two more letters like this together. And I'm actually going to speed up a little bit on doing those strokes just so that this video doesn't get too long, but let's do the letter M. So the letter M in the total is going to look like this. And in this letter, you're really going to see how consistent your strokes are. So we have a row of overturns. Then we have another row of overturns, and then we have a row of compound curves. Let's do them consecutively. So we would have an overturn, an overturn, and a compound curve. And if you notice, these are all on the same angle. At this point, it's going to look nothing like a letter. And then when we put them together, overturn, just touching the next overturn, just touching the compound curve. And that gives us the letter M. This one is a very, very clear example of how the basic strokes turn into a letter and how the more consistent you are with your basic strokes, the more consistent your letters are going to look. If you had an overturn that was skinny and then an overturn that was wide and then a compound curve that went on different angles, see how quickly that letter turns wonky versus this one? And that's simply because the basic strokes aren't consistent enough. And then lastly, I want to talk about a super kind of outlier letter, which is R. And there's a few like this in the alphabet that you'll only know if you learn them. So the letter R in total is going to look like this. And again, if we're referencing those basic strokes, you can see we have an upstroke and we have kind of the shape of an underturn. And then we have this kind of weird one here. So keeping those in mind, we're going to do an upstroke, a row of upstrokes, and then we're going to do a row of this stroke. So this stroke actually starts higher than the rest of them. It's basically just a pressure and release. OK, and then we're doing basically an underturn stroke. Just it starts lower. So if you picture an underturn stroke, it's exactly the same, except we're not doing that first piece. So we're going to start the underturn stroke just lower than usual, but extend the upstroke all the way up. There we go. Now, if we do them consecutively, we have our upstroke and the one that extends above and then the underturn shorter. Upstroke extending above, underturn shorter. Do it one more time. OK, and then when we put them all together, upstroke coming up above the waistline and then a shortened underturn upstroke of the waistline shortened underturn. So you can see how this one is different because it has a stroke that is not common in the rest of the letters. But as long as you know the basic strokes and you know the general rules for adding them together to create letters, it's pretty easy to figure that one out and to be able to do it nicely and consistently. So as you can see, it's super, super duper helpful to a understand the basic strokes, but be have someone walk you through and break down all the letters when you've never done this before. I see too many beginners trying to just look at an alphabet and copy it and just frustrating the crap out of themselves. If you liked learning the letters this way, this is exactly how I teach all 26 lowercase letters in my full course and in my workbook. So it's got the workbook with all of it broken down that way and a video that goes along with it all broken down stroke by stroke with traceables and space to practice. That is linked below if you want to dive deeper. And again, if you're brand new and you don't even know the basic strokes yet, go grab my free beginner course first, because it's super easy and it's very, very important to learn. Both the links for those things are going to be down below, but I really hope that this was helpful.