Gothic Calligraphy with Instructor Dan Nelson: Letter "O"

oh my goodness what other corny old thing can i say here it's time for the letter o you fill in your own corny pun and we'll let it go with that the o forms the foundation for four of our letters a c a g and o and a q so if you can get the o down you've got four of your letters down begins not at the top that's the first thing i want you to notice you start a little bit what does a little bit mean i don't know a pen nib width and perhaps just a little bit more from the top guideline and then scribing a as much as you can a perfect crescent a perfect that is the outside of this should be an o shape that's stroke number one then we go very close to the top again not quite at the top we do a vertical stroke straight down and then connect to the inside of that crescent now why didn't we go all the way to the top the reason is we still have one more one more length to go up here and that is we leave the top of this and go up just a little bit more and then draw the other half of the circle got it so that's why we finally got to the top up there and then we do a vertical stroke using your pen in the number one position two hooks and two ladder marks that line up with the hooks let's do that again without quite so much verbiage a nice thin crescent moon vertical stroke and by the way i don't know if you're noticing this or not but i like i like to leave a gap right there i don't like i like it when those two don't touch there's in in in uh gothic old english german script whatever you want to call this i think the the open and closed intersections have a lot to do with how the letter feels if you close all the intersections make everything connect to me it gets too heavy and clunky uh but if you leave too many of them open the letter falls apart and gets wobbly so that's all my language for why i i tell you to to make sure some connect and some don't it's just an attempt to make sure that it looks gothic ish you've heard me use that similar term perhaps a couple times now and the same thing applies to every calligraphic font i want it i want chancery to look chancery ish i want unseal to look unseal ish and even though there are mother documents for all of these uh alphabets for all of these fonts uh just a little bit of research will show you that there's quite a range of variety there's a lot of variety in in the gothic script so there's my oh let's do it now with a pen after you have matured nailed down your gothic script then and only then in my opinion are you free to improvise and make up your own one of the mistakes that i see in the calligraphy world is people leave the traditional script too quickly and begin freelancing before they really really have an eye for what looks in this case what looks gothic does that make sense so make sure you have it down before you start before you start freelancing and being creative get one alphabet get get one gothic alphabet well in hand before you move on let me do that oh again one arc and a vertical connect to the inside of that arc and the second arc coming around this way and my vertical stroke and my two hooks and my two what i call ladder marks there we go that's capital o now let's talk about the lowercase o the lowercase o also forms the foundation for many of the gothic letters and uh if you can get the o down you'll have many of your letters down here's my guidelines do you see there's my x height and that is exactly how tall and it starts at the top at the header line if you will comes down at an angle vertical elongated diamond down there now up here we have a choice you could just do a straight diamond or straight diagonal and then come down and you could call that up that's a perfectly appropriate got to go got it that's appropriate but we're going to do just one tick better than appropriate and instead of making that just a diamond let me show you what we're going to do so again vertical diagonal make this that apostrophe that's sort of laying over on its back a little bit of a curve to it instead of straight curve got it why because then we get this nice little hook out here that i think looks gothic ish i'm going to add one more thing to this when we do it with a pen and if you've seen many of my other uh lowercase gothic letters then this is what you expect this is familiar to you here's my guidelines for a pen this size diagonal lift up every time you lift up you're going to get a little bit sharper corner than if you just do it in one stroke and then instead of let me let me magnify this let's pretend let's pretend that the first stroke that i just did was that right the second stroke i i'm not going to make it come right to the end right i'm going to cut in just a little bit i'm just blowing this up you can so you can see and make my second stroke start there so they have just this little overhang does that make sense it's so small here i'm not sure how well you can see it so i'm going to come in here leave that overhang and then when i get to the bottom of this stroke i'm actually going to do a little tiny hook out to the left do you see that and then my second stroke is a diagonal then a curve up here another diagonal and when i do this last stroke i'm going to be careful to overshoot uh that i leave this little hook right there i let me draw one more so that we get these little barbs maybe that's a good word for them we get these little barbs on the on the letters that make them look even more there that barb is a little bit carried away but that's good enough that gives you the idea of what i think a really good gothic letter looks like you can do it without those barbs but if you want to add them it just looks a little bit more gothic ish how about that