Best Calligraphy Tips: Improve Your Ovals & Brush Pen Technique

Hey everyone! Today I thought I'd help you with your ovals. So when we are learning our basic strokes, the ovals are usually the most difficult basic stroke to master. So I'll just show you what the other basic strokes are. We have an underturn. I'm using my brand new Dream pens. This is the wildflower color. Overturn. Compound curve. Reverse compound curve. And now we have the ascender loop. I'm gonna have to go down with this. And descender loop. And the oval. So there is the regular oval. And here is the reverse oval. For me personally, the reverse oval is the most challenging, but these exercises today will help you with both of them. Well, the first thing we're going to do is grab some regular paper and a pencil. So I have the Deluxe Lettering Kit and I'll just take out my pencil here. And then you can do this on my own graph paper or grid paper or you can just use regular lined paper. And you can do this exercise at work or on a break or when you're on on the phone. And you're going to hold your pencil the same way you do as a brush pen. You're going to hold it high on the barrel, not like this. And then you are going to draw just ovals. And so if you know how an oval works, I'll just draw one and show you what the stroke looks like. You're not starting on the top, you're starting at the right here. Right there at that point. And the thing I want you to do is just to practice a regular oval like this with your pencil. And I want you to just try to make identical ovals at the same slant, not too big, this is just two spaces high, and the same shape and the same spacing. So if you look at here, this is spaced okay, this is a little smaller, and then I got really tight. So you do want to watch your spacing. This actually looks like a happy face here, eyes and a smile. Okay, I'm distracted. And then watch your spacing and watch the shape of your oval. Do not, you don't have to put any pressure on. So your first exercise is just the pencil and just the ovals. But using the correct grip on the pencil, the same as you would your brush pen. Okay, the next exercise I want you to do is do the same thing. But now you are going to actually put pressure on the correct part, which is on this side, it's called the shade, you are going to put pressure on this side of the oval. So let's go up, push, release, and meet up again. So with your pencil, you're going to have a dark shade on this side, and you will have a light line on the right. So your goal is the same, your goal is to have the same spacing and the same size of ovals. And honestly, depends on my day, sometimes I don't get this right either. But if you do this every day, then you'll see a big difference in how your ovals look. Okay, so look at this spacing and look at this, obviously not great. But with lots of practice, you'll get a lot better. The third exercise I want you to do is actually you're going to use an upstroke now. So we are going to draw an upstroke. And that is, that's kind of a strong angle. It doesn't matter what angle your upstroke is, but I just want you to do your natural upstroke. And then you're going to draw your oval starting the same way. But this time, you're going to create, draw it around that upstroke and make sure your upstroke cuts it in half. So look what happens here. All of a sudden, my angle is a little bit different. And maybe when I was doing these ovals, I wasn't following my natural angle. Or maybe when I drew this upstroke, I actually wasn't. I was drawing it at too harsh of an angle, but you'll find your way. So one thing I want you to pay attention to, there's my light upstroke, the spacing again, but I want you to watch to see where you apply pressure. It is not at the top and not at the bottom. So you should have lightest pressure there with your pencil. Light up, push, release, and exit. Meet up, light up, and then starting here, light up, push, release pressure, and meet up again. So the key is lightest pressure on the top and the bottom. Now we're going to put down our pencil and we're going to go to our brush pen. You can use any size of brush pen. I've got the dream pen here, so I'm going to stick with the dream pen. But I'm going to use the guidelines on my grid paper. I'm going to mark them actually with my pencil first, and I will mark them as four or five squares high. I think I'll do four squares high. I always add these extra lines just so I can clearly see my guidelines for which are my baseline and my my baseline and my waistline. This is what we call the X height. So I will always draw my guidelines even though I have already grid or dot here. Now we're going to do the same thing, but this time we have our brush pen. So your first, uh, sorry, we're going to do number two and number three. So we're going to start on the left and push, release, and come up again and meet up. So what is your goal? The same spacing and the same size of oval. Well now I'm sweating. I wonder if I'll be able to do it. That's not too bad. And starting up, push, release, and meet up again. I never know what I'm going to, how I'm going to let her when I do these YouTube videos. All right, so you're going to try that exercise, and then I'm going to add my extra line here just so I can, um, it's clear what we're doing. Now we're going to do the exercise number three with the slanted line. So we're going lightly up, starting here, light up, push, release, and meet up again. And oh, this is a bit off, but by doing this, you have a clear sense of where you're releasing pressure and where you're starting pressure. You can see I'm off here. And so you don't, um, use your slanted line as your guideline. So you don't have pressure too soon, and you don't release too late. Even that one's not great. I hopefully will get one right before the end of this video. That's, that's a bit better. So even with me, you know what, it can be challenging to write ovals. They are not, they are not that easy, but if you get them quite consistent, I think you'll be a lot happier with your calligraphy in the long run. Okay, that one was pretty good. Now let's, I'm going to just grab my small brush tip pen just to, um, show you the difference. So this is a fine tip. I'm going to go to a much smaller size with my lettering. So I'll just, uh, with my basic strokes, I'm just going to continue this over here. So I'm going to work with two squares high with my smaller pen. All right, I'm going to put paper under here because this is a little bit bumpy. Okay, I have the fine tip pen from my deluxe lettering kit. And let's continue this exercise. I'm going light up and starting on the right, up, push, release, and meet up again. Light up, light up, push, release, and meet up again. So you can see the shade or the thicker stroke on the, this curve. My pressure is really good. I'm light here, I apply pressure, I release before the bottom, and then I have lightest pressure right there. These almost look like coffee beans. I should call this the coffee bean drill. So light up, light up, push, release, and meet up again. Whoa, I don't know what happened there. Okay, spacing, watch your spacing. This spacing obviously is no good. But you will get better and that is kind of a gong show. Okay, what I, the other thing, the last thing I'll show you is you're going to do the same exercise with the reverse oval. So you can see the reverse oval. You're starting at this point and you're coming up and around. So I'll just grab this brush pen, my dream pen. I just love this color. This is a wildflower. Okay, and I will just continue on. So I'm starting here, I'm going up, push, release, and meet up again. Now I'm going to do a light upstroke. Remember that exercise. And honestly, if you don't have much time, just do this one exercise with that upstroke. That'll really be very helpful for you. Okay, light upstroke first, and then I'm starting on the left side. It's the reverse of the other one. Going light up, push, release, and meet up again. Hmm, that's not too bad. Not as nice as that one. I'm getting nervous. Light up, come up, push, release, and come up again. That one's better. Okay, so tip of the pen is at the waistline, tip of the pen is at the baseline. So pay attention to that so you get your nice shade in that area. Well, I hope this helps you with your oval letters. Let's take a look at them. So we have an A is our oval, a B is reverse oval, C is an oval. Okay, I lost track of my guidelines. Happens to me so easily. So this B should be higher. This is why I draw them, but okay, I didn't, so. And when you're doing your oval letters like this, you can do one at a time or do them like this. E, oh, I lost track of my guideline. F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, O. There's many forms of, many versions of O, and that's kind of my favorite one. P, okay, Q. Look at all these letters with the oval. See how much it matters? S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. No, that's, Z is kind of a reverse oval. I'll just add it. That part is reverse. Did I miss any? Probably. A, B, C, D, E, G, O. Anyway, okay, so these are your oval letters. These are your oval exercises. I hope this really helps you, and you can have some fun with your practice with this, these drills. One more thing I wanted to mention. You do know that you can practice your, all of your basic strokes and your lower and uppercase alphabets in my Learn Brush Lettering Workbooks. So at the beginning section, you have instructions, and then here's the basic strokes and drills. The very last one are the, the very last pages are the ovals and the reverse ovals. Your tracing paper is already in here. I have my big Dream Brush Pen, which is a large tip. I follow the arrows, and I practice my ovals like this. So what I showed you earlier, what were free hand practicing of ovals. So you can leave the tracing behind after you use the workbook, and practice the, your ovals with the other techniques that I showed you.