Calligraphy Tips: Writing Letter L

Video Transcript

"Right now, here's our L. Nice simple letter. We start out with a basic stroke. And without stopping, you just kind of, start going this way. Pull over, finish with a little bit of a serif. I would like you to take note, please. This is basically considered to be a two storey letter. Needing to be not so wide. Why? Because of this whole big counter area. This big space in here. If I would have pulled this cross bar. This is a distinguishing characteristic of the L. And if I would have pulled this out too far. Then what's going to happen is, I'm going to have such a big space in here. That the next letter, whatever that next letter is. Is going to have to be so far away. That is going to cause like, what I would call big sort of, gaping space in here. And that would, that would interfere with legibility. So for that reason, we're going to bring this L, over. Now this is our model but in real life, when you draw an L. You are making slight adjustments in terms of the width of the L. Sometimes, you may decide that you're going to take this stroke down a little bit. So that you can move that next letter, over a little bit. These things are done. This is not typeface. Ah ha! O.k. Very important word, is listen. Well, calligraphy doesn't make much noise. You're not listening to calligraphy, you're not listening to music. You're listening in the sense of paying attention. So listening is, but listening is also just a really great word to bring into your consciousness. Now, I want to bring in the idea of language. Calligraphy, we're talking about the alphabet. So we're talking about making words. So we're talking about language. Talking here about the English language. But there's another kind of language that's involved with calligraphy and lettering. And I call that body language. So, I would like to take a break here. And stand up and talk to you just a little bit about what I mean by body language."