Gothic Calligraphy with Instructor Dan Nelson: Letter "Z"

If you're doing this in alphabetical order, woo-hoo, raise a cheer. You are all the way down to the letter Z, or I was born in Canada, so for all of my cousins, the letter Z. Yes, thank you very much. Let's do a Z together. It starts out with a wide S curve here at the top, very much like the letter T, except that I think the T is, the cross beam is even a little bit wider than this. So this is unique to the Gothic alphabet, a wide S curve, not quite as wide as the T. Now, the next two strokes are unique. We haven't done any like this. They're at an angle from top all the way to bottom, and then another one parallel to it from top to bottom. Now, I don't know if you can see, let me do that again. I turned my pencil over, so there we go. There's a little bit of dimension to these lines. That is to say, if we're holding our pen at the, you with me? One, two, three, four, five, at the three and a bit angle, if we're holding our pen at that angle, and we did, if we followed that angle, our Z would be way too wide. So we can't have it that wide. So we're gonna go down at a little bit steeper angle. And then when we do that, we get just a little bit of dimension to our stroke. Does that make sense? Let me do that again. Moving to a clean pace on, a clean area on the paper. A wide S-curve and an angle down. And then the second stroke exactly parallel to that one. This is kind of fun. There's nothing else like it in the Gothic alphabet. And then just as the top S-curve connected to this first line, our bottom S-curve connects to the second diagonal line. But we're not quite done because we want the letter Z to have, all of our letters to have sort of a weight at the bottom so that they look like they're standing up, that they're not upside down. We add just a little bit more weight to this line by doing one more recurve going back that way. Got it? Now there's one more stroke, you've seen this in the sample that we do to the letter Z to finish it. And that is a cross bar right across the middle, right there. But we don't draw all the way across. Isn't that fun? We kind of leave a little bit of a gap right there in the middle. Let me do a Z again with less verbiage. S-curve, diagonal, second diagonal, parallel. Talk to your pen, talk to your hand, make it parallel, hand, there we go. And next S-curve with that recurve coming back this way and then the cross beam. Got it? That's the structure. That's the bones of the letter. Let's now move to the pen and see if we can do it with a real calligraphy pen. I'm using a Speedball C nib, of course. Here's my guidelines for this. So I do an S-curve straight down to the baseline, second stroke straight parallel to the first one, down to the baseline, and then another elongated S-curve with this recurve coming in here and meeting. Got it? And then the cross bar right there. That's all there is to it. That's a capital Z. Let me get a clean piece of paper and we'll do the lowercase Z. Going back to our pencil. And again, you're drawing with me, right? That doesn't do you any good to just watch this video. You need to be practicing right along with me. The lowercase Z then is quite simple. Here are my guidelines down here. The top stroke, I'm not gonna make it an S-curve. I'm gonna make it straight. A little bit of a barb there and straight across because I want the next stroke to be curved. And it's sort of like the Gothic calligraphy, the Gothic font, is this careful interaction between straights and curves, straight curves. You don't want a whole bunch of curves. You don't want a whole bunch of straights. You want right in between. So that line's straight. This one becomes curved. And then this one is one simple curve like this with a nice barb on the end. Then we add a cross bar, just like the capital, and we're done. I think I can go straight to a pen and show that to you again, this time with a pen. Make sure my ink is flowing just the way I want it to. There we go. Little barb, straight across, curve down to the base, and then another curve up back to the base with a barb and a cross bar. That's a rather extended Z, isn't it? It's a little bit wide. I kind of like, I like the looks of it a lot, but let's do it again with a more moderate profile. Straight across, curve down to the base, another curve, and a little barb at the bottom. Then a cross bar. Let me change that. It's gotta be a little thicker than that. There we go. The letter Z. And if you're doing yours in alphabetical order, then you, as I, have just finished the alphabet. You can write anything you want. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye.