A Beginner's Guide to Modern Calligraphy and Brush Pen Lettering -- a Crafty Sundays Review

 

Disclosure: I was sent a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Happy First Sunday of Summer!! As a teacher and a mom, I love summer!! It means more time doing things I love and more time with family!! With my teaching schedule this past year I feel like I really earned my summer vacation. I need time to recharge and get ready for next year. One thing I always try to do when I'm stressed out is craft. My mind needs it!! I am always amazed by the people who have beautiful penmanship. You know the ones that make beautiful words with what looks like little effort. When I was young, I took classes on calligraphy and discovered if I take my time and put effort in and I can write in calligraphy pretty well. But it always takes time. These days there are more modern writing and fonts and I always love trying them but usually without much success. Today I am going to share a book with you that helps train you to write in those modern fonts and use a brush pen. The book is A Beginner's Guide to Modern Calligraphy and Brush Pen Lettering by Maki Shimano. 

From the Publisher:

Create beautiful hand-lettered journals, invitations, cards, menus and more with convenient brush pens!

Master calligrapher Maki Shimano shows you all the techniques and provides hundreds of colorful examples to inspire you. Creating your own calligraphy is very easy using Shimano's time-tested method of breaking down each letter into a small number of strokes. And she provides dozens of ideas for decorative motifs such as wreaths, balloons, birthday cakes—and so much more!

This easy step-by-step guide by an experienced calligraphy teacher allows you to develop your skills quickly.

• Start with the basic tools and techniques of hand lettering
• Learn to draw 8 elegant typefaces with just 2 or 3 simple strokes
• Create compositions with fancy flourishes, "bounce" and rhythm
• Design a planner, journal, place cards, greeting cards, gift tags, invitations, etc.
• And much more!

From Me:

This book does an amazing job of describing the materials--especially pens. It then has instructions on the various strokes and how to make them with the brush pen. After practicing this, it gets into the fonts. The suggestion is to place tracing paper over the font and copy it to get the correct strokes, etc. I happened to find a modern calligraphy set on clearance at Staples and picked it up to have the brush pens. It also gave me lined practice paper! 

I still need more practice and may get some tracing paper to trace the various fonts, but I wanted to get to playing a bit. The are two different types of font pages. One like the one below which shows the direction of the strokes and the order. This type has the uppercase and lowercase letters on different pages. Then there are the practice pages that have uppercase and lowercase letters next to each other (ie. Aa). These are the ones suggested to use the tracing paper. I decided to practice with the first type of pages for this post.

Practice and lines are key to writing. Personally, I find the lines tedious, but everyone uses them including professional writers. I remember watching some of the best writing teachers at Paper Source do their fancy writing and almost always they first drew faint pencil lines to make sure their letters were even. 

One thing I love about this book is it doesn't just teach the fonts but also has a section on how to flourish your letters. I love that it shows words without flourishes and then different ways to flourish them. It also shows different ways to flourish certain letters. After flourishes it teaches balance. It shares different shapes and styles and adding color. Then it shares some inspiration in various categories of commonly used phrases and then the galleries of projects like planners, cards, gifts and gift wrapping.  

I tried a few of the words and phrases. I experimented with the flourishes and had some fun.

I broke the rule about drawing lines for my practice with love.

I finally got one I loved!! I could have been smoother with the transition to the flourish but I was happy with how it came out.

I also did the word "sunny". I tried a few different things with it but only took a picture of my final product.

Since this year my word of the year is self, I thought this saying would be fun!

Again I tried different samples to practice it and get the balance and flourish right.

Then since I was writing on the summer solstice, I thought I would do a "Happy Summer". I tried to do the letters over one another but since my brush pens were only black, I wanted to do the banner method. It took several tries as well to learn this method, but the first step is to put tape down where the banner will be.

I wanted to jazz it up a bit with some color, so I used some of my coloring markers to do this on my next try.

I still need some practice, but I have all summer to do it! The book is a wonderful teacher full of tutorials and projects. It is easy to follow and perfect for beginners. I hope you will check it out!!