Have you always wanted to give calligraphy a try, but felt intimidated by all the rules and fancy swirls? We’ve got some tips to help you perfect your Calligraphy style, great for handwritten invitations and place settings at weddings or parties. You can discover all these tips, plus more activities to try with our calligraphy journal. It’ll turn you from near novice to practically professional in no time.
Select the perfect paper
Start off smooth! The smoother the paper, the easier the flow. Once you get the hang of it you can play around with some fancier textures. It’s worth noting that cartridge papers can be prone to bleed, so have a play around. It’s best to start off with 100GSM paper which you can find in some of our notebooks, sketchpads and journals.
Pens, pens and even more pens!
Make sure you have a range of pens on hand. Practise with ballpoint pens, fibre tips, felt tips, fine to broad nibs and markers. This will give you the flexibility you need to learn. Once you’ve mastered these types, you can start experimenting with more specialist calligraphy pens.
Practice makes perfect
Get used to working on how letters are constructed. Try writing them in a few different styles with upstrokes, downstrokes and loops. When your pen is travelling upwards, keep your pressure light, when it’s travelling downwards, apply more pressure.
Begin by writing the alphabet in a fine pencil or pen, add weight on the downstrokes and then fill in with a thicker pen or brush pen. Try writing the letter separately, together and then with movement on the page. Play around with writing in upper and lower case. You’ll start to understand the form of each letter and how they fit so nicely together.
Use guidelines
When starting out, use guidelines to help structure your letters. Don’t feel too constrained by this, you can stray outside the lines, it’s just for practising spacing and getting used to the way your hand moves.
We would love to see how you use your calligraphy journal, so please give us a peek at some of your work by tagging us on Instagram @frompaperchase, or using #frompaperchase
