Putting The Strokes Together

Welcome back! You have worked really hard to get here, you have gone through:

That is a huge milestone! Now it’s time to put what you have learnt all together and create some letters. This post should be a quick one, because it’s actually all about the practice; the workbook for this series has a sectioned labelled “Alphabet” especially for this.

Cherry Pearl Creative - Brush Calligraphy Lowercase A with Basic Strokes

Putting The Strokes Together: Lifting Your Pen

As you begin to practice writing each letter, you will see that it is probably easiest for you to lift your pen between each separate stroke. This is completely normal, and actually encouraged for a beginner. When you become more advanced at this and it begins to flow naturally, you will likely forget to lift your pen and find it normal to flow from one stroke to the next.

Remember, do whatever works for you! As you build confidence, don’t be scared to experiment with the strokes and letters, as that is a fundamental step in developing your own style.

Cherry Pearl Creative - Brush Calligraphy Lowercase b with Basic Strokes

Cherry Pearl Creative - Brush Calligraphy Lowercase m with Basic Strokes

How did it go? As you can see, a lowercase cursive a is made up from an entrance stroke, an oval and an underturn stroke. The cursive b is made up of the entrance stroke, an ascending stem, and a reverse oval. Finally the o is made from the entrance stroke, the oval, and the smaller exit stroke to lead onto the next letter.

Now that you have idea of how to make letters, I hope you can see why it’s so important to complete and practice the Basic Strokes sections of the tutorial. They are all really useful in actually making letters, and they show us what parts of the letters are meant to be thick or thin.