Pen Angle for Italic Hand Calligraphy

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to look at the slant of letters. Now we talk about slant in a lot of different ways. There's the pen angle slant. There's the slant of how you hold the pen personally. But there's also the way the letters fit into the guideline space and the forward slant. We think of italic as having a forward slant, so if I write the word lift, we're going to see that the letters all slant consistently forward. Now most American writers have a forward slant built into their handwriting. I think it's a little bit about our cursive, but when we translate into writing round letters, sometimes it's hard to see where exactly the slant exists. So I wanted to show you that if I make an oval that even in the rounded letters, we're thinking of the forward slant as being the axis through that oval. And we're thinking of creating a matching forward slant in all of the letters, so italic is characterized by the narrow shape of the letter forms, like we've got an oval, and the forward slant of the letters."