Calligraphy Tips: Writing Letters U,V,& W

Video Transcript

"Coming to a point, thinner line, second stroke is a thinner line; bilateral symmetry. Okay, now there was no "U" in the original Roman alphabet; the "U" actually, later on in history, became a real letter as the "V", started to relax a little bit, and get a little bit relaxed, and pretty soon you had two letters for two slightly different sounds, so the "U" is a more modern letter. It is a single story letter, so you want to keep it wide enough. The "V" is also a single story letter so you want to keep that wide enough. What makes a "V" a "V"? The fact that it doesn't have a crossbar? The fact that it doesn't have the two legs of a "M"? Here it is, being all itself. Now the "W", remember how the "U" started out as a "V", so that's somehow how you wind up I guess calling this a "W". But the "W" is also a letter that got added later, and if we were to think of it in terms of being two "V", okay, it would be way too wide. We want to keep it bilateral symmetrical because that's the way we are, bilateral symmetrical, so we're comfortable with that idea, and all the rest of the other letters. So what we're going to do is we're going to just make the two parts of the "W", these two "V" a little bit less wide, a little narrower."