How to Draw the Lowercase Calligraphy Letters - I, L, J, R, F, T
Hi, I’m Juliane Wasserman, and my studio is Wasserman Design, and we are learning the renaissance Italian italic script from the 15th century called chancery cursive, so let’s continue. Now we have another set that is straight, these are curved letters, the C, O, and E. The letter I, we would call it a straight letter, although we’re writing it with a pen that’s tilted to an angle 45 degrees, and I’m writing that letter at a slant. And I don’t know the degree of slant that I wrote that, so that’s one. Same thing only it’s twice at large. Same… we start again. Here I came down, start a curve and put a little foot on it. And again… now here, I didn’t curve this to get a little foot or a little hook on the end of the letter. Why didn’t I do that? I just came down, and I started the letter at a 45 degree angle of the pen and I ended and there… I’m at the same 45 degree angle. Which means that this whole width of the line is the same width from top to bottom, and that’s good, okay. I did that, leaving it without a hook, because I’m coming back into the thick line and I’m gonna make another arch, and there is my letter R. And we can dot the J and the I, and dots are a personal trait. They’re… they’re whatever you like, you can make a dot like a triangle or a little diamond. You can make it like just like a quick off hand movement gesture. Or you can… you can make things like little backward comma or exclamation points or quotation marks. It’s up to you, and sometimes you go up, but it adds a bit of character and put some flare into your writing. And each person will do… will dot their letters their own way. So I’m gonna move this in front of me again and do the second set. The I, oh, I’ll move over. So we have C, O, E, I, L, J, R, these are the straights, and we have one more set. And this is another long one, but this combines the angle and the curve. So we have one stroke… two… three… and then I flatten my pen so it’s not 45 degrees anymore. I flatten it… there. That’s four strokes for the letter F, and you notice this cross bar is thinner than the width of the down stroke. That’s intentional, because a character trait of the letter F, but the more indicator of the letter F is the long down stroke. So we have another letter similar, and that’s the T. Looks like an… like an I or an L from the bottom, but I didn’t have the hook on the left, I started from the right and went down. But I’m gonna cross the stroke the same way. We’ll do this again. So I’m gonna write all of the letters of these three sets for you, and you can see how they start to flow together. So when you’re writing words, you can… you can see… you can see how these three different types of shapes go together. I go down the two more spaces to the space where I have my x, and I’m going… now notice I wrote all these down strokes or curved strokes and only afterwards am I crossing the letters and dotting the letters. I wrote them all before I added these final touches, because I wanted to keep the rhythm of my hand as it’s moving. So that this letter F would be as close to the letter C, and the E, and the O, as I… as I can write it without interrupting to make an incidental mark. So this is the first group of letters in the small miniscule letters of the chancery cursive script, and now we’re ready to write another set of these letters.