How to Draw the Lowercase Calligraphy Letters - P, B, K
Hi, I’m Julian Wasserman, and my studio is Wasserman Design. And today we’re learning the chancery course of script. We’re learning right now the miniscule letters. And the second group of letters begins with the P. So, we’re introducing letters with a curve and a straight. So the letter P, holding the pen at a 45 degree angle… down… two strokes. It looks just like the J, so far, then I go back… and that was four strokes. I’ll show you again… there… and another letter… letter B. And the third letter… there… now, I’ll write this letters and… and talked you through them. On the first letter, the P, we want to keep our pen at that 45 degree angle and we are going down at a slant. Before we get to the bottom of the next space we start going in to a curve. As if we are going to land an airplane or something. Okay. Then we want to put, we don’t have to put that hook on like this, we can put a hook like that. But still the very first stroke tells us that this is not an H, because we’ve gone below the line. And this… this line stroke below our x height is called a descending line. So then I pick up and I want to curve the letter down… this is important, picking up… curving, and adding a ball, half of a ball to a straight line. It’s like when you make… when we made the letter O. It’s this second portion of the letter O that is like that portion of the letter P, you see. So instead… instead of this portion of the letter O, that second stroke is it… is essentially what I’m putting on to this. Okay, and then I can leave my P with the… the angle or I can put a little foot on it. The letter B, it’s almost like I’m doing it inverted, although, it… you know, when you’re writing it doesn’t matter whether it’s upside down, it just feels very different. But I’m going down and I’m already going into a curve, but I’m making it a little wider curve than I did for the letter L, or the letter T. See that space in here is a little wider, and that’s because, like I did to the O, second stroke, and the P stroke, I’m going to make that same up curve and I’m gonna meet that hairline where I left off. So that’s two strokes, and the way I started this letter B is with a hook, the way I begin the letter I and the letter R. However, I could also start from the right hand side and go down and go into that sort of curve with a little wide ball and then add that second stroke of the letter O, and then I have a hook this way or this way. And if I have a hook this way, usually I put this little finishing stroke on it, so that it balances this very long letter so that it… still going to the right, where we have our slant. And then our third letter is the letter K. And I also can do the same first stroke coming from the right, so that I have the smooth curve and then I end it without a hook, just like I did the letter R, because that’s my first stroke. We only put the hook the foot… the foot… the hook foot at the end of the last stroke of the letter form, so there’s the hook because that’s the last stroke. This was the first stroke, and then I could add this little hat. Little flag, but I wanna explain something, when you’re making the letter K, we can also do it this way, that in the second stroke, it’s small like… like when we made an E, we put this little eyelet, tiny little eyelet at the top, when we’re doing that to K, we’re coming from a steep angle. Here we did it at a very top of the letter, here on the K, I’m doing it further down that… that space. But then when I come in to meet that first line, I change the tilt of my pen from that 45 degree angle to, you know, maybe 10 degrees, because when I make this stroke I’m coming out of an angle, and I want this stroke to be as wide as this stroke. If I did not tilt my pen to this… this way, you see how, that’s not 45 degree angle anymore. This is 45 degree angle. But if I make this stroke a 45degree angle, you see how fat that mark is, and it’s so much wider than the first stroke, that it looks awkward and unbalanced. So I tilt the letters… I tilt the pen so that I’m giving my… all my strokes with my letter forms an even appearance. Okay, for that set, we have the… and I’m turning… there.