How to Warm Up for Calligraphy
Hi, I’m Julian Wasserman and my studio is Wasserman Design, and I’m teaching you how to master the art of calligraphy with the chancery cursive script. And we have ruled our lines for writing the alphabet letters. But to begin writing with this pen, I wanted to show you some ways to warm up your hand and get into the groove and the flow of wet ink and very wide writing instrument. So this is the C – zero Speed ball pen in the generic penholder. I dip it in my ink, which is not floating anywhere since I have taped it down, and I used my tester which I taped beside my table or my paper, so that I can get a sharp line. That’s all and I’ll be using this a lot. And then just to get a flow, I can pick anywhere on the blank sheet of paper, so the middle is fine, and just wiggle the pen on the surface of the paper to make sure that the ink is flowing. And then you can just move the pen so that you can get it to keep on writing. Now, I took, so we can do it again and go farther along. And it’s an exercise to just loosen up your hand, get the pen to flow as you’re moving it, not to let the pen get, run away from you. And you can just make up all different kinds of doodles that get the pen moving that it doesn’t break up, or that break up the line so that your ink isn’t clogged. Or that you know how much pressure you have to push to get the ink to flow out of the pen. And you could fill up the whole page. You can do straight lines, and run them parallel to one another so that they have a rhythm. And that gives you a sense of control that you can write different shapes and marks and have them be uniform. Pushing the pen vertical, vertically across the paper is another effort, the pressure that you apply to your pen to get the ink to flow. You could do zigzags. And then you could start making a curvy shapes as if… and just, you know, do this for a while until your hand is relaxed, that the ink is flowing and you feel ready to write. Now here’s an example of doodle warm up exercises that I had done earlier that fills the whole page. So, now we are ready, our hand is warmed up, we’re ready to begin writing our alphabet letters. We’ll start with the small letters of the alphabet of chancery cursive script.