The 45º rule is going to be your best friend in lettering. It helps keep your pens from fraying as well as keeping your strokes consistent.

The goal is to have the pen at a 45º angle from the paper. It will help your thick strokes stay the same thickness the whole way down, as well as your thin strokes.

It took me waaaaaay too long to learn this trick, but it is a GAME CHANGER.

I repeat, a game changer!

The tip is to hold your pen perpendicular to the downstroke.

Perpendicular means “at a 90 degree angle to” – so if your downstroke isn’t slanted and it’s perfectly vertical, then your brush pen should be horizontal.

If you are writing with a slant, then your pen angle should change also to compensate.

Feel free to tilt your paper to make this more comfortable on your wrist and arm.

By keeping the pen perpendicular to the downstroke, it helps give the start of your strokes a nice square shape, as well as helping the thickness taper off at the nicely.

I get asked “how do I grip the brush pen?”

The answer is “literally however it feels comfortable”. Where you put your fingers (in relation to each other) is entirely up to you, as long as you can get the 45º angle from the paper and the 90º angle from the downstroke.

A lot of the time, it is easier to hold the brush pen further down the barrel (away from the nib) which can help you get the right angles.

Again though, it’s entirely up to you. So don’t stress about the grip, don’t stress about finger placement (actually, don’t stress about any of it, calligraphy is meant to be relaxing). Just focus on the angles until it becomes muscle memory.

The last part is simply to practice. When you keep practising while focusing on the pen, it will become so natural that you will end up doing it without thinking.

To help you practice, make sure you check out the worksheets in the resource library that’s specifically built for brush calligraphers. If you don’t have access to the resource library yet make sure you sign up here:

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