Basic Strokes: The Overturn Stroke

Hi guys, Cherise here from Pieces Calligraphy. In this video we're going to review the overturned stroke. The overturned stroke is another basic stroke every brush calligrapher should know, and if you've been tuning in the past few weeks you've seen the other strokes in my basic stroke series, the entrance stroke and the underturned stroke. And to those of you who are sharing your Thank you so much. I really love seeing your progress and it helps to see what your questions are. So keep on posting and if you want to join us on Instagram post a photo of your practice and include the hashtag pieces underscore basic strokes. I check out the hashtag when I get a chance and I love just connecting with you all and practicing these basic strokes with So let's get into the overturned stroke. The overturned stroke is an upside down u shape and it's actually only used in a few letters. These are underturned strokes here and what it what I'm basically doing is if you can imagine this is the waistline and this is the baseline of my of my letters. I'm starting at the baseline with a thin upstroke and then I touch the waistline still with a thin upstroke and then after I come around for the curve going down is when I apply thicker is when I create the thick downstroke by applying more pressure. So if you've seen in previous videos on on pressure and thin and thick strokes you'll remember thin up and thick down. So thin upstroke or light pressure touch the waistline and when I curve back around that's when I do the thick downstroke and apply more pressure. And the key to know is that that transition doesn't start until after you hit the waistline. Don't start the thick downstroke until after you touch the waistline curve back around. It's pretty quick it's not halfway down or anything it's it's just right after but you don't want to get too thick up high. It's just not as elegant as if you have that if you could keep the thinness and then transition afterward. Let's do the two letters that I've identified that have the overturned stroke the letter M and then the letter N. You'll see that the letter M has two overturned strokes and then the letter N has one and it's these two are followed by the compound stroke which we'll actually talk about next week. Spoiler alert. Okay and then I'm going to quickly go over a couple of practices that you can try. You can simply just do the overturned stroke by itself and repeat it. Do just single ones isolate the stroke just like that and as I mentioned in previous videos go back and critique yourself. I went a little too past the baseline here and some of these are a little too upright so you really want to work on that slant and we'll talk later about whether or not you need to do that slant and how to find your own style but in keeping up with my style I like to do them at more of a slant and then you can also connect them together like a bunch of ends and the key to connecting them is that you're actually not connecting them in one fluid motion. See how I'm lifting up my pen? You probably noticed with my other videos that I do lift up the pen even though the goal is to make it look like a connected stream of strokes here and just a tip when I'm lifting up the pen for the overturned stroke I'm lifting it up so that my thin hairline starts on the outside of that thick down stroke. See that? This is different than if I did not lift it up and just you know did my thin upstroke there. See how now there's less space in this connection between the strokes so make sure to start your thin upstroke on the outside of that down stroke. And then just for fun I'm excited to do this word for you because it has an overload of overturned strokes and you can try practicing this word too. The fun thing about this word is it actually uses a couple of strokes we've already talked about so there's your overturned stroke there's your entrant stroke if you can notice it here followed quickly by the underturned stroke in the eye and then again more overturned strokes and here's an underturned stroke. Isn't that fun? The only stroke that's in here that we haven't discussed is the compound stroke which is when you, I'll do a quick preview, when you when you do a thin upstroke transition to a thick downstroke and then you transition again to a thin upstroke so the thickness is really isolated in between here. Okay so thanks for watching I hope this was helpful for you leave a comment below and tell me what you think and also follow me on instagram to see my latest work and to keep up with my pieces basic stroke series. Please post your work I love hearing from you and seeing your progress and also I will have a link to the actual blog post that goes along with this video with pictures and more of an explanation in case you missed it in the video. Thanks again for watching and have a great week!