Increase the Consistency in Your Calligraphy

How to Improve the Consistency

In Modern Calligraphy

Create A Consistent Alphabet in Modern Calligraphy

Consistency can make or break a piece of calligraphy art. It can help even the simplest calligraphy look great, or it can make even the most complex pieces look pretty average.

As you can see, it’s pretty important. There is good news though! Consitency can be taught, and improved with practice. Here are a few tips to improve your consistency in calligraphy.

Increase the consistency in your calligraphy.

1: Use Guidelines to Develop Consistency in Calligraphy

If you get the right guidelines, they will do half the work for you. People often struggle with consistency in the stroke width, spacing, stroke size and stroke slant. Guidelines help with the second half of that list, easily.

If you get the guidelines that have slant lines included, it brings all the letters together at the right angle and makes your calligraphy look elegant and beautiful.

I have found that if I use the same guidelines enough, with the same degree slant, then it embeds into my muscle memory. Eventually I naturally end up doing that same slant for all of my letterforms and the slant becomes consistent even without using guides.

2: Practice The Strokes To Develop Consistency In Calligraphy

One of the things I mentioned earlier is how people struggle with consistency in the stroke width. This is talking about 2 things:

1: Getting the thickness (or thinness) of each stroke the same as each other

2: Getting the thickness (or thinness) of the stroke the same throughout the stroke.

This is where drills come in handy. If you practice the basic strokes over and over again (with the same, or similar pens) you will dramatically improve the consistency of your strokes.

Malcom Gladwell (author of Outliers) says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at something. That’s a whole lot of hours! If you become a master at the basic strokes, then it will be easy for you to create a consistent and beautiful alphabet.

Stroke worksheets help with this incredibly. They maks it easier by giving you exactly what to practice so that you don’t need to think about it. The strokes are all laid out and traceable so you can do it without having to think too hard about it.

(Keep reading to find out how you can get access to a whole library of free resources to improve your brush calligraphy.)

Sit in front of the TV, grab a cuppa and practice your strokes easily.

3: Play the Kerning Game To Develop Consistency in Calligraphy

Kerning is the fancy name for the spacing between each letters.

This is where a lot of people get stuck in developing consistency in their modern calligraphy: they struggle with spacing.

There is a good brain challenging solution, to help with your kerning and increase your consistency.

The kerning game is found over at Kern Type where you’re given a word and using your mouse you move the letters (in between the first and last letter) in order to make the spacing better. You click “Done” when you’re finished and it gives you a score out of 100.

If you want to get better consistency in the spacing of your modern calligraphy I recommend you get obsessed with this game.

It will give you different words in different fonts to help you with your spacing in every environment.

4: Practice Your Letters to Develop Consistency in Calligraphy

This may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how often this one gets missed. If you want to create a consistent alphabet then you need to actually practice the alphabet.

All of your a’s should look the same as each other, as well as the b’s, the c’s and so on. This can also help develop your style: what kind of “a” do you prefer? What do you default to? What would you like to change it to? Explore the different styles but practice them. Practice the same style again and again.

Different styled letters - increasing the consistency in your calligraphy

Once your letters start to match up with each other, the consistency in your overall calligraphy will look amazing.

Once again, worksheets help with this, because you start by tracing the same letter style over and over again, helping to drill it into your system and avoid any accidental alterations.

5: Hold Your Pen At The Same Angle To Develop Consistency in Calligraphy

Do you know about the 45 degree rule? Holding your pen 45 degrees from the paper makes it easier to get nice, clear and consistent thick and thin lines.

This way you don’t have to change your wrist or fingers to transition into thick lines, you simply add pressure, which is the way it’s meant to be.

If you aren’t already doing this, make sure you practice the 45 degree rule and see if it improves the consistency in your modern calligraphy.

Get the Worksheets from the Resource Library

If you are on the lookout for free worksheets to improve your calligraphy and lettering then make sure you check out the resource library. I update it often with new or improved worksheets which range from basic stroke drills to flourishing. It’s password protected and only available to the awesome Cherry Pearl Creative family so make sure you sign up here to join the family and get the password, if you haven’t done so already: