Basic Strokes: The Underturn Stroke

Hi guys! Charisse here from Pieces Calligraphy. In this video we will review the undertone stroke. The undertone stroke is another basic stroke that every brush calligrapher should know. Last week we talked about the entrance stroke and now we're building upon that knowledge and now moving on to another stroke. And you'll see over time that these strokes work well together to create the letters that I know you're all eager to start writing and some of you have, which is great, but breaking down into these basic strokes is really important for making sure you have the right letter forms so that way as you write longer and bigger words and phrases you'll be sure that your hand knows the strokes naturally and you're not worried about your form and instead you can focus on the words themselves. So let's go over the undertone stroke. You can see here that it's basically a u-shaped stroke. It starts really thick, the full thickness that your pen creates, and then you work your way down and before you hit the baseline it transitions into a hairline. And I've talked about in a previous video that you shouldn't worry too much about it actually looking like a hairline, but imagine when I refer to a hairline just think about the thinnest width that your pen will create. So thick downstroke and transitions into a thin upstroke. And I'll go ahead and demonstrate that here. So thick downstroke transition into thin upstroke. Thick downstroke and up. And the undertone stroke is used in many letters. I'll go ahead and show you here. So for example the letter A, it consists of an entrance stroke, an oval, which we'll talk about it in a future post, and then here is your undertone stroke. And then the letter I, entrance stroke, undertone stroke, and then letter U, entrance stroke, undertone stroke, and then another undertone stroke. And then the letter W, which is essentially a U, a letter U, and then at the top of the exit stroke you have a small little comma dot there, which we'll also talk about in the future. And then it's also in the letters D and T, but the thing about the undertone stroke in these letters is instead of starting here at the waistline you go up higher to the ascender line and then continue as you would the undertone stroke. Same thing with the T, up above, not the waistline, but above to the ascender and then into an undertone stroke. So those are the letters that you can see the undertone stroke being applied to, and then now I want to show you some quick, I'm going to quickly go over, not that you should do them quickly, but some drills that you can do to practice. So you could, for starters, just slowly do the undertone stroke over and over, and I always stress to fill a page, but what I haven't been stressing is to not simply fill a page without thought to any of your strokes. Write one line and then take a look at it, critique it, think about what you want to improve on, and then when you go to the next line try to work on those things. And then once you've gotten the hang of that, another drill that you want to try is connecting the U's, connecting the undertones, which are essentially U's, and this one's my favorite one because you get into a rhythm and that rhythm is what you want your muscles to really feel as you write so that you get consistent letters. So create one stroke, one undertone stroke, and then from where my pen stops, lift, and then move over just slightly, and then create another one. You're going to basically repeat that over and over, and then again critique. I think these two here are pretty close to each other. I want them to be a little wider, and then go at it again. And as I'm doing these drills, I'm paying attention, as always, to the way I'm holding my pen and the direction it's facing. Those are things that you should always keep in mind. And then the last drill, I'm going to squeeze to the bottom of the page here, is connecting the entrance stroke with the undertone stroke, just like that. Essentially, which is the letter I. But I like this drill because you're building on your knowledge from last week. Entrance stroke, undertone stroke. And it's nice to see letters coming together. This is essentially your letter I and the beginning of your letter U. I hope that was helpful. Please let me know what you think in a comment below, and visit my blog for the post that goes with this video. And tune in next week for another basic stroke. And if you're on Instagram, I'd love to see your progress. Just post your work and add the tag, the hashtag, pieces underscore basic strokes. And subscribe to my channel and to my blog, and you'll get these videos and posts directly in your inbox each week. Thank you for watching!