How to Draw Calligraphy Flourishes - Part 1
Hi, I’m Juliane Wasserman, and my studio is Wasserman Design and we’ve been learning the chancery cursive script from renaissance Italy. And it’s a formal script, and it’s a beautiful script. And the last thing, after you have already learned your small letters and your capital letters, there are special ways of connecting some letters that you might find playful, fanciful, ornamental, and just really enjoy making from time to time as you write a piece of text. So I’ll show you those now, you do not have to use them, if you would like to, you’ll think of at the spur of the moment, but it’s not already set up, you know, as a required version of your letter forms. It’s just from time to time, they might seem appropriate. Okay, so the first thing I’ll show you is how to make a variation on this letter, D. That’s the D you know, that I taught you. And another way of making this D is as if it’s a ballet shoe, I’ll make that… and then I’ll write a word. It sorts of connects the word and the letter form… there. So, as if this were a ballet shoe. It’s coming from the right to the left, instead of just leaning toward the right. Okay, so, another couple of letters is a… and in the word went… to have an exaggerated cross bar. Okay I have… maybe at the end of the line, you have little space before your right hand margin and this long cross bar will help get you to that margin at the right side. But if you’re writing a word where the T is in the beginning, you probably want to have that just fit in as they normal… usual cross bar for the T. however, the letter M doesn’t have the constraint of having other letters to follow it. So now it could be an exaggerated stroke. Now that’s a hairline and a flourish. Then… and where you interject these exaggerations in your text, will make for the decoration of the whole piece of writing without any pictures, without any color, just with the abstraction of the letter form shapes and the added touches. Some individual letters we can show are… this is our R that you’ve learned today. And this is another R, and this is another R… shorter. And this is an RT… so that becomes a… a like a ribbon, right. We can do that to the S and the T as well. Double curve for the letter S… there. Now the letter F is taller, what if you have the word ruffle and you have two F’s together. Well, this is the top of the… the… this is the longest letter in the alphabet of this script, and this is the way we make it on its own. If we were having two letters together, we could make it… we could make it like this. Shorter for the first one… and longer… and then put that hat on the first F, the hat on the second F and put the cross bars as a joint link. So if I were going… there. Together, that’s a double F. There’s another way to make that… there. And these… these are some of the ornamental features that you might want to add. Now, those are two F’s, what if we have the word willow in we have two L’s together. Well, just like we did, we made a short F and then a tall F, we could make a short first L… and then a tall first L… tall second L, excuse me. So it just adds a little variation to the letters. Also, you might find in some piece where the… the two L’s spell a word, you might want to, not just a ribbon to it, but add the whole bow… there, make your double L. And there are some other… we had the two F’s together, I just wanna show you, you can also… oh sorry… if we have the word finite and the F and the I, what we can do is we can cross the F so that it connects to the I, and then just dot the I. We could also do this with the T… small T and an I, the cross bar in the T connects the I. It adds for a little saving of space.