The Easiest Kind of Calligraphy

Okay, so you're short on time, you don't want to spend any money on supplies, but you want to be able to write in fancy calligraphy. Cool, I got you. In three minutes or less, I'm going to show you exactly what you need to know. First, cursive writing is not the same as calligraphy. You need to know that. But for the purposes of this video, let's just pretend for a second that it is, and I'm going to show you how to zhuzh up your cursive a little bit. So first, write what you want in cursive. Let's say it's thank you for a thank you card. Okay, now what you need to know about calligraphy and making this look more like calligraphy is that the calligraphy rule is that anywhere your pen is moving in an upwards direction, it's a light line, and anywhere it moves in a downwards direction, it's a thick line. So with that in mind, let's go back over what you wrote in cursive and thicken anywhere your pen moved in a downwards direction to make it look more like calligraphy. So here I was moving up, here I was moving down, so I'll thicken this a bit. Here I was moving up, here I was moving down. You get the idea. So just continue doing that on your whole word. Okay, so this looks decent. If this is exactly the look you were going for, go ahead, use that. I'm glad I taught you something. But I'm betting it looks a little bit off, and it doesn't look like the calligraphy that you see all over social media that you want to replicate. So here's what it would look like if I did the same thing in calligraphy instead of cursive. Just watch for a sec and see if you can spot the difference, and then I'll explain it. I'm betting that you noticed I used a different pen, but also I did this in strokes, so you might have noticed me lifting my pen in between each little piece instead of just one fluid motion like you did in cursive. And that's because calligraphy is built up of what we call basic strokes. Here's what those strokes look like if I just use a sharpie with no pressure on it, not a upstroke, a downstroke, an overturn, an underturn, an oval, a compound curve, an ascending loop, and a descending loop. Now if we went with the rules that I told you at the beginning, what you would do is you would go back and thicken anywhere your pen was moving in a downwards direction. So by thickening those strokes, you can see where the fins and the thicks are. Now if I did that in a brush pen, just adding the pressures right off the bat, this pen is flexible, we have the strokes with the pressures. So this would be considered faux calligraphy, this would be considered brush calligraphy. Now doing your strokes like this makes it more spread out and more consistent looking when you start to make your alphabet. So in order to make your writing look like calligraphy instead of just squishy cursive with thick parts, you have to learn these basic strokes. And that way when you go to make a letter it looks more like this, less condensed, less squished, because it's built up of all of these basic strokes. So for example, if I wanted to just do that letter A, I have the upstroke right here, then I have the oval, then I have the underturn. And that's how you build up your letters. So you can see that really broken down into that word and why this one becomes a lot less condensed than that cursive one that you just added the thicknesses to. And that's the gist, in under three minutes as promised. I have a full free course at showmeyourdrills.com if you want to learn these basic strokes and all of calligraphy basics from the ground up. I also have a full video here on YouTube about it if you want to learn a little more, and I'll link you to that one next. But I hope you found this helpful.