Calligraphy Tips: Writing Letter S

Video Transcript

"Watch the counter; when you draw this letters you really need to be paying attention to your counters. Now the "S" is a two story letter, and therefore it's not very wide, and this is something you need to pay attention to because it's an easy kind of error to make in the beginning; how do I mean that; I mean that sometimes in the beginning when you draw this letter you end up drawing it with a spine, this stroke, the first stroke is referred to as a spine; and you end up drawing it with a spine that is too curvy and therefore too wide, or therefore creates a letter that's too wide. And there are "S" like this a little further on, but this is not it. What you want to do is you want to imagine that there's a small circle on top of a slightly larger circle, that gives you your sense of balance your space are heavier on the bottom idea. And imagine the center of those circles and then you're going to start to draw around that circle, and then you're going to straighten out a little bit, just as if you're driving a car and you're going from one direction to another. So, this is a straight curve, okay, it's not ruler straight, but there's a straightness to it, in that it comes this way, and then it comes this way, and then it comes around. And then what you want to do is you want to come back this way, and then come up here and go this way. Now in both of these cases, again, this is going to be a straight curve, so it's going to be like what we did with the "C"."