Gothic Calligraphy with Instructor Dan Nelson: Letter "X"

You have to be able to do the letter X, otherwise we will the pirates know where the treasure is, right? So let's do the letter X. You fill in your own corny jokes. I'll let you do that. Starts out very simply. It's a different letter than most. It's a diagonal letter, very much like our first letter, the letter A, and then of course, the diagonals go in a different way. For straight from top to bottom, a barb at the top and a barb at the bottom, that's stroke number one. Number two is there are a couple ways to do this. One is just draw a straight, a diagonal, trying to make sure that your letters are ending up vertical and then come back and add at the top a little hook like that. I don't think we've done that in any other letter in this alphabet. We've certainly done this at the bottom. Starts at the baseline, goes up, comes back to the baseline and just add a little barb to it. And one of the things you're gonna wanna make sure with the letter X is that it doesn't look like it's leaning to the left or to the right. And really that's just an optical thing. It's hard to measure. Like maybe this could be a little bit longer up here, but you'll practice it till it just looks like it's standing upright. Now we're gonna add one more stroke to make it look gothic and that is the center stroke in the middle. I'm gonna hold my pencil at about a number four angle. It's not quite perfectly horizontal, just a little bit up, so it's a little bit fatter than that. And it doesn't go all the way from one end of the letter to the other, just from a little bit past midpoint to midpoint. Got it? Let's do that again. A straight barb, straight shot all the way to the baseline and another barb or foot or toe at the bottom. And then I'm gonna do that again, just drawing as a straight angle and a hook at the top. It's unique, I think, to all, compared to all the other gothic letters and a curve at the bottom and then this crossbar. Got it? Yep, that looks like a gothic X. Let's go right to our pen. Here are my guidelines here. Up all the way to the baseline and up a hook here and a long curve here. So I guess the one thing I have to mention is that when you do this stroke here, you don't wanna go all the way to the baseline or you're going to have part of that line showing underneath this curve. So stop somewhere above that so that there's room for this curve. And then the crossbar. And that looks to me a little bit like it's leaning. And so if you weren't watching me, I wouldn't get too irritated about that. I would just say, okay, let's do that again and let's do it better this time. A hook at the top. Whoops, and I went too far at the bottom, didn't I? You see that? So I have a little bit of that line showing underneath that curve, which I don't want. Let me do it one more time. I'm bound to get it right. And again, I could pretend that I never make any mistakes like that. Cut all those parts of the video out. But I feel like I want you to understand that that's very typical for everybody who practices calligraphy. Those are the kinds of things you practice. There, let me fix this. There we go. That's a pretty good looking X. Just add the crossbar and I'm all done. Okay, let's talk then about the lowercase X. Pretty predictable. Here's my guidelines. Here's my X height. Hey, we're actually doing the letter X where X height is from whence it gets its name. Diagonal, straight down. Now the lowercase, again, to make it look gothic, we do a couple of things. One is instead of a hook here, I'm gonna make a curve this way. Got it? And then this curve is very much the same and a crossbeam. So the only real difference is the upper right-hand corner, of course, and the fact that it's shorter than a capital. Let's do that again. Little barb, diagonal, little barb at the bottom. Then my diagonal line, making sure I don't go too far down here. Up here, I add just a little tiger claw. Bear claw, we'll call it a bear claw shape. There, come up with a different name for that thing down up there. And down here we have this curve. Got it? Let's try it with a pen. We'll see if bear claw sticks or not. We'll just find out together whether I use that anymore. That's a good, that's what it looks like. Little barb down to the baseline, little barb and diagonal going the other way. Curve here and this, okay. Claw shape curve right up there. Crossbar and there we go. That's a very good gothic X, which marks the spot. So you can mark all your spots now that you've got the letter X down. We're almost done, hang in there.