Different Strokes

I have officially started my calligraphy learning project, and my enthusiasm is still high for learning this new skill. I’m going to be honest, if you type calligraphy for beginners into YouTube, you will be completely overwhelmed with the number of channels dedicated to teaching this art. After fumbling through the list of options, I landed on a channel called The Happy Ever Crafter. What I immediately loved about Becca’s channel is how well everything is laid out and organized depending on how I want to learn. The video list includes Modern Calligraphy with a Pencil and How to do Calligraphy with a Sharpie among many other interesting videos. This immediately made me rethink purchasing an expensive calligraphy kit on Amazon, but I assumed I needed an actual set of calligraphy pens to learn calligraphy (apparently, I have a lot to learn).  I feel like I must shout out to our Instructor, Katia Hildebrandt, for introducing us to the uBlock Origin Chrome extension because I suffered through ZERO YouTube Ads while exploring the vast content of her channel.

The first video I watched was her video called Learning Calligraphy Start Here (it seemed like an obvious place to begin, ha-ha). This video once again reinforced the idea that I could have skipped the expensive kit and gone with simple, flexible brush pens; there is one of these in the marker kit I purchased (perhaps I will investigate getting a few more colours of these brush pens). Becca discusses the importance of learning strokes before learning letters and encourages everyone to find printable worksheets.  Becca runs a free digital calligraphy course a few times per year; this course is a treasure trove of user-friendly content that I found so valuable that I put my name on the course waitlist. I have high hopes that it will open during the spring semester, but if it doesn’t, I am determined to continue my learning journey beyond this course period, thanks to the solid foundation I'm building with her resources.

Becca includes worksheets in her free digital courses, but since I can’t access them yet, I decided to hunt online for a different worksheet option that would introduce the basic strokes of calligraphy (worksheet link). I have printed a pile of worksheets to continue practicing my basic strokes (you can see a couple of my first practice sheets as images in this post. Getting the weight on the strokes correct is definitely a challenge but I will persevere. This online resource has been amazing for learning from scratch, she also has great videos for tips and tricks for more experience calligraphy artists.

While this is a very challenging skill to master, I do think I am making slow but steady progress. Stay tuned as I try out an app next...