hi everyone and welcome to this mini series on faux calligraphy I think it's a really essential
tool to have learned before starting calligraphy because you sort of tend to learn the anatomy and
the structure of what calligraphy is based better from focaligraphy it's also a great
tool to have when you have got a project that you want to do calligraphy for but it won't work with
a brush pen or a dip pen so by understanding the faux calligraphy you can use anything to
create that calligraphy look so some examples might be chalk or paint or markers but to learn
the basics all you need today is a pencil or a marker or a pen any pen lying around and I will
teach you how to create focaligraphy and just how to think about what you want your clear
feed to look like the first video so today's video I'm going to show you in real time how I
would create every single letter in a sentence of the English alphabet and then in the next
few videos I'll have a deeper look into individual letters both uppercase and
lowercase and so hopefully by the end of this little mini series you will feel a
stronger grasp on what focaligraphy is how to achieve it and how you can apply it to
any style of lettering of your own so without further Ado let's get started [Music] foreign
calligraphy is a really great thing to know how to do it will instantly lift any lettering to just
look more professional straight away and it's very easy to achieve it's awesome if you are wanting to
achieve that calligraphy look but you don't maybe have the time or the patience to be practicing
all the up and down Strokes that we do with a dip pen and a brush pen so this you can use any pencil
pen or marker and achieve a really cool looking brush calligraphy appearance without having to go
to the extremes of practice so I have been making handmade cards since I can remember I've always
enjoyed making a handmade card so I've always found use for lettering and prettifying lettering
I still remember at school all my projects the titles would always be nicely done I'd put a
lot of effort into how the word art would look and then I've continued that into my journaling
and on here so it's interesting to see how wow something that I was interested in so long ago is
still relevant today and now even more so really because I'm a firm believer in the fact that we
have to keep keep practicing these creative paths because the future is going to take a lot of roles
away from us with the way developing technology is but I think one thing they can never take away
is our hands and our ability to practice skills and you know build creative Endeavors so that is
something I really hold dearly I just want to be able to achieve results using my hands and keep
that traditional skill of Art and lettering alive and I thought a good thing to start with for a lot
of people if you're having trouble grasping the practice or the concept of the whole up stroke
that is soft and the downstroke that is hard maybe that's a little bit tricky why don't we bring it
back even further and actually just learn to understand where where the parts of a letter
should be thick and where the parts of a letter should be thin so by doing faux calligraphy you
are really just getting it into your brain which parts you're going to be making thicker because as
you're writing the letters as you normally would you'll notice where your hand is bringing towards
your body and that's what we call coming down so therefore that stroke will be thicker so having
a look at what I'm working on today is a phrase that we've all heard that has every letter of the
English alphabet in in it so I thought it would be good to use that as the phrase and then you can
watch and see how I build the calligraphy look from the basic structure of normal handwriting
I'm using a fairly simple serif font and I'm just starting each letter connected to the next so that
they look like they're joined so it looks sort of cursive like but the key is to work on you
know individual letters at once and then later we build it up by thickening all those Strokes
that we came down towards our body with so I'll go through that in more detail as we watch the clip
and then also as I mentioned at the start this is going to be a series so if you find that this
isn't quite in depth enough I will be releasing the next part of this series which will go into
more detail of each individual letter in uppercase and lowercase so that might be more helpful to you
for your practice so just check in the description box down below in case it is the future now and
I've already uploaded those particular in-depth videos okay so just going back in time a little
bit I wanted to show you how I Ruled up my page the paper I'm using is rhodia I really love their
notepads or calligraphy practice pads but this one is blank pages so I wanted to Mark mine up I
used a color arrays blue pencil and a brown pencil so the blue lines represent the Baseline and the
Ascender line which is where the capital letters fit between and then the brown line that I've put
through the middle of those is called the midline which is usually where the lowercase letters will
come to so it's just a nice little guide it doesn't have to be perfect but it's a good tool
to use while you're practicing and then once those lines were ready for me to use I am going straight
in with a pen that I have had sitting in a pot on my desk for God knows how many years it's a
uniball eye fine so it's got waterproof ink I think you call it a rollerball pen I've never
really used them that much but it worked really well for this purpose because I really wanted to
be able to see the ink coming out but I wanted to find some sort of pen that I think is quite common
to find just in normal stationary drawers so you don't have to go out and buy something so honestly
this technique works with any pen you choose but I just wanted to let you know the particular one I'm
using in this example [Music] so I started with a handwritten font as I mentioned this one is just
my own handwriting with slightly curlier accents I guess quite a therapy style but literally just
try it with your own handwriting first so that you can sort of understand the concept first and
then you can try and copy the way I have written my letters and then it's about thickening them up
[Music]
thank you
try and be mindful when you're thickening up the down Strokes to make them all roughly the same
size I find it helps to put the line down on the right hand side or the left hand side of
the stroke it shouldn't matter which leaving it open and then once you've put in those strokes
and you see that they're the right size then you can fill them in and that's another technique you
could leave them open and that looks quite nice if you're going for that look but obviously today we
are filling them in when things tend to curl around edges like the bottom of the s or any
of the loops that you sort of have to taper the stroke off so you don't want a harsh line because
you want it to look like it has just flowed like a ribbon of calligraphy so just try and
taper the edge of your thickness off to meet that stroke so as you can see it's very easy to achieve
results it's nothing too Technical and you're not having to worry about any pressure on your
hand or positioning of your hand it is completely your natural handwriting and then just thickening
those down Strokes you'll also notice that at the end of mine in this example I've actually done
like a little thick sort of droplet at the end of any Strokes that are left unattached and this
is just a personal thing that I like the look of I feel like it gives you a little bit of a point
of difference in your faux calligraphy and I just think it looks really nice I think it looks like
a dip pen has left a little bit of ink or your brush pen has just had a little bit more pressure
put onto it and I just think it looks quite nice so that is just a personal preference if
you don't want to include that you don't need to so it's just there if you wanted to give it a go
so showing you the last line of this phrase the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
I'm once again starting with my basic lettering and then as I'm doing it I'm being mindful of
which Strokes I am pulling down towards my body so this first line of the D was a stroke that
I pulled down towards my body then it went up towards the top of the D and then down towards my
body again to make that Loop and then it continues the O I'm starting pulling downwards then moving
upwards and then downwards for the G as it's just like that last Loop for the O and then
the tail of the G is also down towards my body and then finishes with a nice curly upstroke [Music]
so then as I go in to thicken up my Strokes I'm almost imagining how my hand Drew each letter
and then I'm thinking in my mind that whenever my hand was coming down towards my body I want
to thicken that area up and then once you've grasped that concept that is when you can really
practice with any kind of lettering it could be a Sans serif font meaning there's no little
accents or ticks on the end of letters so a very structured modern font and then you could
also just be mindful of where you're bringing your hand down in those positions and thicken
them up so there is lots of different font styles that you can use this technique to just make more
interesting to the eye and then one last tip would be to I think go on the side of less is more I
find in some of the classes that I teach sometimes people will try to add too much thickness on the
letters because they think it might be maybe not enough with just one downstroke but I think
it is quite intentional where you place these thicknesses so be confident knowing that if you
just follow that downstroke action you will end up with something really nice looking and it won't
look over the top it'll look nice and simple and realistic so here is the finished phrase for you
to have a look at feel free to repeat this video and copy along and follow each letter if you want
more don't forget to check out those other videos that are either coming soon or are already here so
I hope this was helpful thank you for watching and all the best for your lettering see you soon bye
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