New Flourishing Worksheets – Ascenders and Descenders

Are you wanting to increase your ability to flourish? To help you get a better grasp of adding embellishments to your calligraphy, I have added a few traceable flourishing worksheets to the resource hub. These are A4 pages that focus on flourishing certain strokes of the letter, such as ascenders and descenders. Print these worksheets out on smooth copy paper (see what I recommend here) and trace over them with a small brush pen. Otherwise, feel free to just download them and use them on procreate if you prefer digital calligraphy! If you don’t have access to the (brand new but ever growing) resource library yet, sign up here and grab the password.

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Flourishing Ascenders

Flourishing ascenders usually goes a bit backwards, starting with your pen at the point where you want the flourish to end, and work your way back towards the top of the ascender. This makes it really smooth to transition into the ascender and continue writing. When learning, it is always handy to sketch it out first so that you know where you are going before writing it in ink. Otherwise, it’s very easy to misplace the ascender and not line it up properly. That’s another reason why flourishing worksheets are really helpful: so that you can build up your muscle memory on flourishing shapes and where to place the ascender.

Flourishing Descenders

Flourishing descenders is the opposite of ascenders, as the flourish starts where the descender starts rather than where it finishes. So we start at the waistline, draw down towards the descender line and seamlessly flow from the descender stroke to the flourish. Descender flourishes can swirl all over the place, underline the word or even climb up the sides. This makes them really great for filling in gaps around the word. They are very flexible, so try it yourself with the flourish worksheets to get an idea of the general shapes, and then experiment by changing the size of the loops and the length of the tail.

Next we will chat about flourishing t cross bars, underneath the word, and entry/exit strokes. I will upload flourish worksheets for all these strokes too so keep checking in with your eyes peeled. Otherwise, sign up for the password to the resource hub here and I will send you an email when it gets updated with all the calligraphy freebies!

Also, I have a full size flourishing book coming out soon. It’s a 50 page book that goes through the fundamentals of flourishing in detail, to help you feel confident to flourish your calligraphy pieces. If you would like to be the first to hear about this, pop your details in the form below and you will be automatically updated when it is available.