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!

Dip Pen size

Whenever you decided to use dip pen or fountain pen, you might need to make a decision before you start with: about the nib size.


On average, nib size divided into 3 different sizes; EF, F, and M.
There are also B (Bold) and EB (Extra Bold), but those upper three sizes are the most popular sizes.

• EF (Extra Fine); 0.5 - 0.7mm : Very fine tip that you can draw elaborate stroke.
• F (Fine); 0.7 - 0.9mm : Regular tip size for writing.
• M (Medium); 0.9 - 1.0mm : Quite thick size, and usually for signature.

Also, there are two types of nib; steel nib and platinum nib.
Steel nib gives you more realistic feeling while you are writing, whereas Platinum nibs gives you more soft feeling. You can choose whatever you prefer to use.




Usually, Asia brands makes more fine nibs compared to Western nibs.
As Asia characters needs more strokes for writing, they produce more fine nib.
That means that not all EF, F size nibs are same size, so you need to test it before you buy.
If you want more handwriting feeling, I will recommend you some Asia brands.

Platinum - Nakaya

Sailor

Pilot - Namiki

Also there are some Calligraphy pen nib and for lettering nib.

ZIG Calligraphy pen

Hello, guys! Today I'm here to tell you guys about the 'ZIG calligraphy pen' from Japan.
Whenever I saw this pen, my first thought was 'Wow, that's something unique!'.
With this pen, you can do a LOTS of cool things!






Gradation is the most impressive effect that ZIG pen can give to us.
When you put each end to other end, dark color shifts to the light color and get blended. With this color mixing, you can give full effect of blending and color changing without converting your pen.

                                                                   

                                                                             


                         

This is tip of ZIG pen

Also, this pen has two different size tips.
Usually, people use big size tip to blend the color just because that is much easier to detect the color blending.
Small tip - in my case - is for small details and decorative things. You can use the small side of big tips but with small tips, you can have twisting effect because of the edge.

You can see the thick stroke and thin stroke in my work :)
That gives a huge effect as a detail or a decoration!

I just introduced you the marker pen in ZIG calligraphy pen, but there are also brush pen in it.
(Just because I owned marker pen, not I don't like brush pens.)
Both pens are able to do these effects, so you can choose whatever you prefer.

Marker and brush pen effects

Like always, have a great day and enjoy your calligraphy! :)

Real life Calligraphy

Today I'm gonna share some of my calligraphy work to give you guys some idea what we can do with it.
Usually, I use calligraphy things for special events such as celebrating birthday.
However, you can do whatever you want with your calligraphy skills.

In Korea, we have parents' day instead of Mother's day or Father's day. At that day, we give carnations to our parents. So, I draw two carnations with normal marker pen (like sharpie), and colored with color marker pen.
The special thing about my tool is, I cut my color marker pen from round to diagonal shape. At that time, I was very into making the gradation with colors. To make smooth gradation, I cut my pen.
Don't forget, you can always have various options on your way!

I'm also very interested in drawing, making stuff, especially new things. If there is a chance that I can, I would definitely try that out.
So, this is one of the result that I tried to challenge on new thing. I found cool pop up card template looks like a blooming flower.

It was just a flower pop up card at the very first time and I thought I can put some more work on this plain card. And this is the result!
It did not work out cool as I thought - which is sad for me -, but still I like that effect with my ZIG calligraphy pen. Tried to make that effect as a growing branch or greens but I'm not sure that I did well or not (Hahaha).

I'm pretty sure this is one of my cool work.

I like to use my gold and silver ZIG calligraphy pen - which has metallic effect - on the black paper.

Metallic ZIG calligraphy pen cannot to blending (maybe just for the gold and silver..?) but that's okay I still can deal with cool calligraphy work :)

I focus on small effects rather than big contents. After making a basic format of my work, I do small dots and lines even though that people can hardly see it. I personally think small things makes quality higher - but still, big outline is important too!

These are some of my calligraphy work that I did.

You can use your calligraphy anywhere, and anytime.

Do limits on your use of calligraphy ;)