Beginner’s Guide to Using Brush Pens for Modern Calligraphy

Hey I'm Becca with the Happy Ever Crafter and in this video I'm going to show you how to use those brush pens that you've been wanting to try for your modern calligraphy. First thing I want to talk about is what a brush pen actually is. So I see a lot of confusion with beginners sometimes with brush pens and calligraphy pens. So oftentimes if you go into an art store and they have a calligraphy section they'll give you a calligraphy pen. So it's something that looks like this and the tip of it is chiseled. So if you look at that and you can tell that it's nice and flat on the top that means it's probably not a brush pen. So if you look at this one or if you were to test it on paper right away you can tell it's not a brush pen because it's not flexible. So when I push really hard on it it doesn't make a difference versus if I push really soft. So you're always going to get the same weight of line with a calligraphy pen. So nothing chiseled. You don't want anything chiseled. The difference with brush pens is that these are flexible tips. So with these ones if I push nice and light on it versus if I push nice and hard on it I can get a really different line weight. And that's what differentiates brush pens from calligraphy pens. So just make sure if you're trying to do modern calligraphy and you want to do brush pen calligraphy you need to make sure that you're using a flexible tool. So that's what these brush pens are. So these ones are Tombow ABT or Tombow dual tip brush pens. And I often see a lot of confusion with these ones as well because these tips on the end that I just showed you are really nice and big and flexible. But the ones on the other end are just normal felt tip pens. So you can't use these ones as brush as brushes for calligraphy. These are just like for extra decoration and stuff. But these are really great brush pens to play with. So I'm going to show you how to actually use them. Another important note about using brush pens is that you want to use high quality paper with them. So this is Rhodia paper and this is a really really good quality paper. Anything that's toothy they call it which means it's sort of gritty is going to ruin your brush pens. And these aren't cheap pens so make sure that you're using a nice smooth high quality paper. If you need help choosing I have a full supplies guide on my website that you can feel free to go grab. It's just the So with brush pens the way you want to hold them is naturally how you would hold it in your hand. You'll hear some people say that if you hold it weird like this that you should adjust your grip. I don't agree with that. I think that you should hold it however it's comfortable in your hand. But what makes the most difference is the way that your hand is positioned in relation to the paper and the angle that your pen is on. So with brush pens you want to try and hold them at about a 45 degree angle to the page. And you want to also make sure that the pen is perpendicular to the page. So if my page is going this way I want my pen to be going this way. So see how my pen is on this angle and my paper is on this angle. So that'll allow you to get the belly of the brush. So the first thing you want to try and do is hold your pen at a 45 perpendicular to the page however it's comfortable in your hand. And then I want you to try just doing some really light lines from this bottom line which would be called the baseline to the top line which would be called the waistline. Now if you're using Rhodia paper you're just going to arbitrarily choose how big you want it to be. But usually I do about four boxes. So a nice light line barely putting any pressure on the pen from the baseline to the waistline. And you want these lines to be sort of curved not like a huge curve or anything. Just a nice slight curve. And you want to do them nice and consistent. You don't want to be seeing any eyelashes. You want to make sure they're nice and consistent from the baseline to the waistline. So that should be how thin you can get your line. Now you want to try and keep your pen on the same angle exact same. You're not moving your pen in any different direction. And you're going to do the opposite. So you're going to start at the top and go into a hard downstroke. So you should be able to really see a big difference in that thin line versus this thick line. So don't be afraid to push on your pen. These are meant to be pushed on. They're meant to go nice and thick. My only recommendation is that every couple of strokes if you're pushing really hard just rotate your pen so that you're So this is the basis of calligraphy. Anywhere that your pen is moving in an upwards direction will be a light line. And anywhere that your pen is moving in a downwards direction will be a thick line. So light up and hard down. This is what you need to remember. So if we were to combine those into a different stroke what you would see is light up and hard down. And when you do that in calligraphy it makes your word look like calligraphy. A lot of people think that the thick parts of calligraphy are shadows but really they're actually called downstrokes. So they're thicker and they're where your pen is moving in a downwards direction. So in calligraphy all of your letters and your words are broken down into what we call basic strokes. And each of those are going to apply this light up and hard down rule that we've been talking about. So if I were to demonstrate all of the calligraphy basic strokes for you they would look like this. And so when you put all of these strokes or when you put these pieces of these strokes together into different combinations they actually form letters. So if I were to demonstrate that quickly say we wanted to write the letter H. You would take this upstroke then this ascending loop and then this compound curve and together they build up your H. Now I'm not going to get too far into this because I have a lot of other videos that explain it so if you want to learn more about the basic strokes definitely watch this video up here. Now if you want to get started with calligraphy but you don't actually own any of these fancy brush pens that I showed you in this video make sure to check out this video where I show you how to do it with nothing but a pencil and I'll see you next time.