Korean Calligraphy!

As I introduce myself as an Korean, I'm also very interested in Korean Calligraphy.
So much fun to design the letters and organizing words in various way.

Today, I would like to introduce about Korean Calligraphy with some Youtube videos.
Same as English Calligraphy, this is not the only one way to write calligraphy.
However, just to taste about this Korean Calligraphy this will lead you guys to Korean Calligraphy. Enjoy!

And at this point, this might can be little bit early - but I want to say happy new year!
Whenever this season comes I like to make Christmas card and New Year card.
So much fun for designing cards!
At this time, I wanna share this simple celebration note of upcoming New Year day.

Maybe bit early to say this, but 'Happy New Year!'

Left handed products

So, this time, I would like to talk about the left handed products for calligraphy.
I'm right handed person but I do concern about left handed people because whenever you started to realize how they are struggle while they are writing and even for calligraphy.

Problems with lefty's:

Smudging, hand cramps, and uncomfortable notebooks

Dealing with right-handed writing systems and tools, many lefties do not receive proper handwritings.
Instead of that, they figure out how to write on their own.
The result of combination of right-handed materials and strange hand positions causes many left-handed to contend with at least one of the following challenges:

• Smudging and smearing
• Nibs catching on paper
• Poor ink flow
• Uncomfortable notebooks
• Crams and hand fatigue

There are some left-handed considered tools in calligraphy.

Speedball left-handed pen set

- Speedball has left-handed pen set which includes a straight nib holder and six nibs, five of which are specifically designed for left-handers. In Italic nibs in the Speedball left-handed pen set feature a flat edge that is angled in the opposite direction from those on right-handed nibs. This helps lefties achieve the appropriate slant for Italic and other edges calligraphy.

Left-handed pelikano Junior fountain pen

- Designed for children learning to write, the left-handed pelikano Junior provides a specially-designed ergonomic grip to guide proper finger placement. It also features a medium nib with a rounded tip that makes it easier to push the pen without it catching on the paper. Its colorful, thick plastic body is comfortable for adults and kids alike.




There are not a lot of left-handed products as much as for right-handed, but they still exists.
So don't let them to make you down because of left-hand.
I'll stand for you!

Enjoy! :)

Water brush

Have you heard about water brush?
Water brush is a reservoir of water attached to a brush.
Water flow is controlled by a small plastic feed and can be increased by squeezing the barrel.
Artists love their protability: water brushes can be filled from any source, remove the need for open water containers, and clean themselves through use.

• Brush size

Water brushes com in a few basic sizes. Fine, Medium, and large sizes have a round brush tapering to a fine point.
Fine brushes release less water per stroke and are good for detail work, while large brushes are suited for covering larger areas. Flat brushes, on the other hand, are great for large washes of color.

• Body length

Water brush bodies come in several lengths. Shorter brushes fir easily inside pen cases or pockets, but hold less water. Long brushes need refilling less often, but are slightly heavier when gets filled.

• Water-filling mechanism

Water brushes have two filling styles. Some water brushes have an open top reservoir and can be submerged into water or filled with a faucet. Others have a small black cap to keep the water from escaping, and are filled by squeezing the body to suction water inside.










And this video will give you some instruction how to start with!
Enjoy :)

What is Calligraphy?

Hello, everyone!
I have one simple question before we starts.

Do you guys know what is Calligraphy?
Calligraphy is a visual art related to writing. It is design and execution of lettering with a broad tip instrument, brush, among other writing instrument. A contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as, "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious, and skillful manner.

So it is basically means the pictogram by hand writing, not only for the meaning delivery but also contains flourish stroke and effects.


Calligraphy's root comes from Greek work 'Kalligraphia', the compound word of Kallos (Beautiful) and graphe (writing).



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In Eastern Asia, Calligraphy has a long history about Calligraphy.
The Chinese name for calligraphy is shūfǎ (The method or law of writing); the Japanese name shodō (The way or principle of writing); the Korean is seoye (The art of writing).
The calligraphy of East Asian characters is an important and appreciated aspect of East Asian culture.

Korean Calligraphy

Chinese Calligraphy

Western Calligraphy is recognizable by the use of the Latin script.
The latin alphabet appeared about 600BC, in Rome, and by the first century developed into Roman imperial capitals earned on stones, Rustic capitals painted on walls, and Roman cursive for daily use.
Following the rustic capitals, uncial lettering style developed as writing withdrew to monasteries,  uncial script was found more suitable for copying the Bible and other religious text.

European Calligraphy

Calligraphy Guideline

In English Calligraphy , guideline is really important thing for your calligraphy.
It helps to draw accurate gradient and angles.
Even proficient Calligraphers uses guideline because professional calligraphy is all about the line and angle.
So how to create this guideline?
Long time ago, you have to draw all the guidelines by hand. Still there are some people who draws it by their hand, but I recommend you to use this cool site!




http://www.allunderone.org/calligraphy2/calligraphy.php



This site will help you to create guideline easily.

• Calligraphy style

: This will be the title of your guideline.
  Can you see the Name in the yellow box? That will be your guideline title.

• Toggle "X" on/off

: When you turn on this one, X will show up the blank chichis x-height.
  It does not matter when you write one short sentences, but I recommend to use it whenever you are writing long sentence. You can check it on the preview screen.

• Vertical (Angled) lines

: Gradient line will show up when you turn on it. 

• Spacing between verticals

: Space between gradient lines. Usually, 4-5 is nice to start with.
  If it is too wide, it is hard to figure out the gradient and on the other hand, when it is too narrow, it looks so tight and messy.

• Angle of vertical lines

: Setting for angle of vertical lines. In general, Italic uses 5-7 and copperplate uses 52-55.

• Nib width (in millimeters)

: English calligraphy font sizes are depend on what size nib do you use. So write down your nib size.

• Ascender Height in Nib widths

: Setting for ascender line.

• Capital line in nib widths

: Create lines for capital letters.

• X-height in nib widths

: For example, 5x-height means that there are five 3mm width nib is filed up.
  Usually, Italic uses 4-6 size.

• Descender height in Nib widths

: Setting for descender line.

• Whitespace between sets of lines (nib widths)

: 1 set = Ascender + x-height + descender.
  Gap between 1 set and next 1 set.

After setting all of these click the 'Create PDF', and you are good to go!


Hope this guideline help you to reach your great calligraphy!
Enjoy!

Birthday Card! Just a drawing

November 12th is my friend's birthday and she invited me to her birthday party.
So I decided to make birthday card for her.

Well, Calligraphy is for this kinds of event! HAHAHA
(Or maybe in this case, just a drawing...?)

I'll show you some outlines that I'm making for her birthday card!

Recently I saw a cool GIF drawing this ribbon lettering drawing about greeting autumn.

So I decided to apply on my birthday card with different decorations!

Just put some more details so it doesn't look alone...

She is very interested in Korea, so I'm considering putting this 생일축하해 (Happy Birthday in Korean) words in her birthday card. I don't know yet...

I like that crown shape top :)

It was not intended one, but it looks like crown!

And still don't know what to do, but I made some outline for my writing section.

I always have a hard time to figure out what can be the best result of my arrangement.

Hope this will work out easily soon :)

Lastly, this is what I draw, colored, decided before I start the outline.

I liked that cloud a lot, but maybe next time.

(I don't know where to put it...)

It is always happy thing to draw and make something special for someone.
This might can be not pretty or perfect as much as Hallmark cards, but I think this can be the only one card in the world that I created!
Hope she will love this card.

I'll be back with final shot of my card next time.
See you soon!

Nib recommendation

So, I would like to introduce the kinds of the nib for the dip pen.
Before we start, I'll let you know that this is not the standard recommendation because every person's writing habit and preference is different so just take this as a reference.
What you have to do to find the perfect fit on your hand is writing for trial.



So... here we go!

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Calligraphy pen nib for English divided into two big category.

• Broad edged nibs 
• Pointed nibs 

In this post, I'll introduce the Broad edged nibs :)

Broad edges nibs are usually for Italic, Gothic, Uncial, Roman fonts.
2mm - 3mm for Italic and 4mm for Gothic will be easy to figure out the curve and shape to start with.
Too narrow nib will not show you the exact movement and figure of the line.

Speed Ball C-type

Speed ball is nice brand for starters.
You need to take care of Reservoir (Ink container that you can see the top of nib) because if the water stays between the nib and reservoir, it will get rust and ruin your nib.
(Well, it is not easy to manage your nib to get rid of the Ink.... Good luck)

Brause Nibs

Brause is the Germany brand that established in 1850.
They started to produce the nibs since 1895 and now they are creating various kinds of carbon steel nibs over 400.
This nib is not flexible much as speedball, so if you have strong pressure during writing I recommend this pen than upper one.
Also, this pen's reservoir can be separate from the nib so much easier to clean up!

D. Leonardt Tape Nib

Similar to Brause nib, from United Kingdom. Embossed carving on reservoir of TAPE.
You can see the end of nib is cut little bit tilt different from other nibs and it helps your stable writing.

Michell Roundhand Nib

Also from United Kingdom, and the special thing of this pen is that you need to purchase the reservoir separate. If you are not writing looooooooooong script, it is not a necessary thing, but....
This is really flexible nib so you need time and skill to work on it.





I wish this post helped you guys little bit.
Thank you!

Parallel pen and satisfying arts!

Have you heard about 'Parallel pen'?
Parallel pen is from Pilot company which is similar to Rotring Art pen.
Unfortunately, I do not have this pen but I'm seriously considering about having one.

Have 4 possible size and color follows it. (Not the Ink color!)

The most popular size nib is 2.4mm for normal writing, but it's up to you what size pen do you want!

You can have a lots of variety with this pen.
According to angle of pen, you can pull out different thick of lines.
Even though this pen has flat nib, you are able to use to draw sharp edge.






This pen also provides the gradation effect!
(And that means you need at least two pens.... That was clever, Pilot...)




It will be better to show you guys about this pen with cool videos.
I just fell in love with this pen, and I hope you guys too!
Enjoy! :)

Calligraphy Style: and so on....

Calligraphy Alphabets



There are more calligraphy alphabets not only Italic, Gothic and Copperplate.
Those three alphabets are the most popular and famous one that you can easily face with even in your general life.
And I would like to introduce more calligraphy alphabets to you guys.

• Roman rustic capitals

Rustic Capitals are a robust, dynamic calligraphy alphabet, good for titles when you want formality and impact without rigidity. They are basically a nib- or brush- written alternative version of the grand, stone-chiseled, square capitals you can still see all over Roman monuments.

Living in ancient Rome, you would have seen announcements, information or even rude messages written in Rustic Capitals on the wall of the city, in just the same way as advertising posters or graffiti today.

• Unical

Unocal's rounded form owes something to the Greek alphabet, and historically it's associated with the early Christian Church. It superficially resembles traditional Irish scripts (Irish/Insular Majuscule).
In one form or another, it was used in handwritten books for nearly a millennium. For much of that time, it was strictly a calligraphy alphabet (rather than a historical script) in that it was written out slowly and painstakingly to look as impressive as possible.

Unical is easy to read, with serene overtones, and lends itself to short poems, quotations, and titles.

• Roundhand (Foundation hand)

Roundhand is a modern, twentieth-century calligraphy alphabet based on the scripts of the Italian Renaissance, which themselves were invented because Italian scholars had got heartily fed up of trying to read long texts written in tiny, cramped Gothic.

The great virtue of Roundhand is its simplicity.
It may seem like a humble virtue but it is not therefore to be disregarded. Any Roundhand lends itself to circumstances in which you want to communicate sincerely and with our pretension; poems by Robert Frost, instructions in case of zombie attack, children's alphabet posters, letters of advice to your younger self, diaries for publications, etc.

There are tons of other Calligraphy style that you can dig on it.
Hope you can find your own script!

Calligraphy Style: Copperplate

- Copperplate


Finally the Copperplate!
Copperplate is the most extreme form of cursive script with most letters linked; derived from Italic and influenced by copperplate engraving.

The Copperplate is well know as Victorian handwriting.
In Victorian times hand writing was very important. People took pride in their hand writing, this was called Penmanship. Since there was so computer or type writers so everything had to be written by hand. Children would spend a lot of time in school practicing writing on their slates. Being able to write well was very important for getting a good job.

Compared to other alphabets, Copperplate has hairline and shade.
As this style has dynamic use of nib, you have to get used to use your pressure properly.

The Shade and the Hairline!

There were many styles of Copperplate writing. Some of these were developed in the Edwardian era, which was just after Victorian Times.


Here are the three styles of Copperplate.
What is your favorite?

Calligraphy Style: Gothic

- Gothic

So this Gothic is one of the most popular forms of calligraphy. But not use very often, because it is not readable with your eyes and it is difficult to read in large quantities. All Gothic alphabets are made up of dramatic, dark letter forms full impact, contrast and detailed decoration. Gothic is therefore best suited to short and weighty texts without a long contexts such as proclamations, scrolls, certificates, brief quotations... and so on.

In fact that Gothic suits any kind of short official or medieval-looking document for which impressive appearance is more important than legibility.

Whenever you are writing Gothic alphabets, you need to some important skills to do:

• Keep pen angle at 45 degrees
• Draw straight vertical lines
• Draw short, straight diagonal lines - both thin and thick, in different directions
• Small, controlled movement of the nib
• Rhythm!

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BONUS!

You can practice with these sentence for your practice!

as baa-lamb sassy sisters lassos aardvark sesame

straight pajamas jealously abracadabra razzmatazz

sesquipedalian pandemonium assassinations exaggeratedly

circumnavigation antidisestablishmentarianism

floccinaucinihilipilification supercalifragilisticexpoaliodocious

 You might prefer to try our old favorite....

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

or

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Calligraphy Styles: Italic

So, there are a lots of beautiful Calligraphy styles that you can easily detect.



- Italic

Italic is a beautifully legible calligraphy alphabet, and has been taught for generations as the foundation of good cursive handwriting. This font is one of the most well known calligraphy font to public but it is not as simple as it looks like!
Nowadays, hand-written italic alphabets remain ever-popular for quotations, wedding invitations, art calligraphy and improving handwriting style.

As you can see, in this illustration, there are some what we can figure out italic calligraphy's trait.

• a distinctive 'lozenge' shape to the body of letters a, b, d, g etc
• elegant, narrow branching strokes forming the shoulders of letters such as b, h, m, n, p etc
• quite long ascenders and defenders
• usually a slight slant to the right, about 5 degrees
• a cursive, running quality and an upwards flick at the finish of many letters
• a contrast between heavier pressure on the downstrokes and much lighter pressure on the upstrokes
• some characteristic letter forms        ex) a and g are plain and open; ascenders often have a slight flourish

       



Also, you can deal with this two version of italic fonts.
Tilt little bit and you will discover a new kind of calligraphy!

What is stroke and how can I do it? - Western Calligraphy

So, there are particular ways to do calligraphy stroke.

As previous posts were about the basic tools and introducing the concept of stroke.

In this post, I'll tell you how to do proper stroke and what kinds of stroke can we make.

Stroke with typical calligraphy nibs

Need proper pressure to do stroke

In general, dip pen nibs are good to do stroke because they do have flexible body.

Also, it is able to see how much contain the ink and the flow of ink.

That makes you much easier to understand the process of calligraphy.

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Recommendation for calligraphy stroke

Steno (a.k.a Blue Pumpkin)

Steno nib is very popular nib for starters.

This nib is enough flexible to do soft stroke and hard enough to manage the ink. It also called as 'Blue Pumpkin' because of the body color. 

I also have this nib when I was a starter, and this gives me a lots of joy. This nib also hold enough amount of ink so you don't have to frustrated of lack of ink. 

(Well, I love dipping my dip pens into ink bottle - cause that's COOL! - but it is not fun to deal with lack of ink when you are enjoying your calligraphy. I bet...)

Cito Fein

This nib is 0.3mm and have reasonable flexibility for lettering. I use this nib a lot for my general lettering. In my case, I don't give much variety stroke while I'm using this nib but it will give you comfortable writing condition when you use this nib.

Index (a.k.a Finger Nib)

Index nib, as called as Finger nib, contains a lots of ink in it, and has fine tip so that beginners can use it easily. However, this pen cannot do a stroke - well, slightly but not as much as you want - so this pen is recommended for general writing pen.

Rose Nib

And here comes the Rose nib. 

I've heard about this nib and I have this one, but I still did not get used to this extremely flexible nib. This nib is SO flexible that it is hard to manage the flow of ink but it is worthy to work on with this nib because the stroke with this nib is really great.

And you can practice with basic stroke by understanding how does stroke made.

You can practice these single strokes with dividing into several sections.

Don't have to draw them at in a one stroke, manage your tools with proper pressure.

Basic strokes to start with

With proper pressure and loose of pressure, you can make a great art of Calligraphy.
Heavy stroke and light stroke will give you some idea how can you design your letters.
When you get used to this, you can create your own calligraphy not just following the traditional strokes!



Hope you will have a great day!