Gothic Calligraphy with Instructor Dan Nelson: Letter “V”

The letter V has a couple of characteristics that are unique to it. Maybe one characteristic. Starts out like many other letters, S-curve at the top. There we go. Then the next stroke, we need to do one of two things. Normally you hear me say we go down and stop at about one-third of the way up from the bottom. If we do that on the V, we're going to have to make another change. So here, I'm going to make the change here. Instead of going one-third of the way down or one-third of the way up, we start just a little past the halfway point. In other words, this is a truncated vertical. Then the second vertical is also truncated. Just a little bit somewhere between the higher than the... Normally I'd come down to about there. Do you see I'm starting a little bit, stopping a little bit high? That's because we have this unusual curve in the letter V. To make it look like a V, there's a curve here that goes like this and down to the baseline. Got it? Just one curve down to the baseline. Now let me leave that for now. Go back up to the top of the V. We do a simple curve here and then a large S-curve that we haven't done. I don't think we've done this anywhere else in any other letter. An S-curve like this that goes from there all the way to the bottom of the V. Then the rest of it is quite simple. A vertical, two hooks, and our ladder marks. The point I want to show is that this mark has to be fairly long or deep, or we won't have quite the look of a V. People will have a hard time reading. Let me do it again then. S-curve and a slightly truncated vertical stroke. Likewise, the second one, same thing. And then a long curve, simple curve up here, and an S-curve. Let me get this just right. An S-curve that connects all the way from top to bottom. Our vertical stroke is pretty predictable. Now because this is a truncated or slightly shortened vertical stroke, we're going to have a little harder time fitting our hooks in here. So the hooks can't be in the middle of this stroke. They need to be a little bit low so that they line up, say, with the hooks that are on a letter right next door or the next word over. Get it? So it's going to be a little bit lower than normal on that stroke. And likewise, we make the ladder marks right line up with the middle of those hooks. Got it? Then I think that looks like a V. Let's do it now with a pen and see if it looks V-ish. See if it looks, I usually say, see if it looks old English-ish. See if it looks fraktur-ish, German script-ish, gothic-ish. Okay, enough of that. Let's stop it right about there. Second stroke, stopping right about the same place. It leaves room for this deep curve. It starts lined up just like in all of our letters. We want to make sure that the left side of our letter is vertical. It starts way over here but then goes down to the baseline. Up here, a simple curve and then a long curve, a long S-curve that connects that whole letter. Let me do that again. It's got a vertical in it and two hooks that are a little bit low. Got it? Let's do it again. S-curve, vertical, slightly shorter than normal, vertical, long S, long curve. There we go. Simple curve and a long, this is kind of a fun one to do. It's the only place I think we do it that connects those two. Vertical stroke and our two hooks. I'm going to change up now. I'm going to actually do that one more time. The lowercase v is not too difficult so I don't want to take too much time. Let's make sure we get this just right. S-curve, truncated, truncated, long curve, short curve and this nice S-curve. Vertical stroke. Two hooks that are kind of low on that vertical and our letter marks. Good enough. That'll look like the v especially when it's in context with other letters so people will be able to read the word. Now let's go to our double pencil tool and look at the letter v. The first stroke in the lowercase v is unusual. We're going to see it again in the w but instead of being the normal diamond, we actually want to make this just start a little bit above the header line and make it a hook like this. Got it? And then we do a vertical down from there and then a hook going this way. Now the next half of the next stroke is a straight up diamond just like that and then a vertical and then this angle. Got it? I think you do so I'm going to go straight to a pen. Here's my guidelines down here starting just a little bit above the header line. A curve, straight, another curve, very much like the capital. Do you see how it sort of mimics the capital letter? Diamond here, a vertical and then this angle. Let me do that one more time. Curve, straight, longer curve, diamond, vertical. Come on down. Vertical and then angle. There we go. That's the letter v. We're doing great. You're doing great. Let's keep going.