Video: Calligraphy Grids & Guidelines

Prepare a piece of paper for lines to guide calligraphy letters. Learn how to make grids and guidelines to write cursive italic calligraphy in this free art video from a professional calligrapher.

Video Transcript

In this clip, I'm going to teach you how to prepare your paper for the proper size of calligraphy. You're going to be ruling lines unless you have already a grid. Now I have a grid in my calligraphy workbook in the back of the book that you can use to already work on the lines and they're already ruled. I've gone ahead and made some copies of those for us to work with today. But if you don't have lines already ruled and you need to determine how big to do your lettering, you're going to take your calligraphy nib and you're going to rule out five nib widths. Five nib widths is a standard size for lettering for that size nib. So you can always determine for the nib size you're using how big to do your lettering based on five of the widths of that nib. And in this case, we have a C-O calligraphy nib that's made by Speed Ball and this would be five nib widths and that will be the body height of your letter. Then to use, to determine your capital letters, you will go up two and a half times that, so there'll be another two and a half times. But first we start with the basic body height. And we rule those lines. Now you know your basic body height for this particular C-O nib will correspond and give you the right dimensions for that letter. To determine how to write a sentence or words, you need to have body height, which is the five nib widths. You need to have an ascender for the tall letters and a descender for the lower stems. And then the capital line, the capital height. And once you determine your five nib widths, then you can do another five for the bottom and another five for the top and halfway in the middle for the capital line. And then you will always follow that throughout your writing the same size. Now, if you'd like a thicker letter, you can do four nib widths, or if you'd like it thinner, you can do six. So you can play around with that. But this is the balanced, correct amount for each nib. So this is what we will prepare.

Calligraphy Grids & Guidelines

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