Calligraphy Tips: Body Language of Letters

Video Transcript

"So letters have body language, OK? They stand there and they say things just with the shapes and the forms that they're taking. The Roman capital alphabet has a body language that says, that speaks of dignity and straightness, so for example, our capital A stands here like this. Very very straight, bilaterally, symmetrical, standing there. It doesn't stand there with big wide legs like this, taking up too much space and being a bully does it? But watch this, OK? Here's an A, here's an A that's not a Roman capital A. This is a very fancy A, which I did. This is a piece that I did called the scarlet alphabet. Instead of the scarlet A we're calling, I went ahead and did the entire scarlet alphabet. And that A has an entirely different body language than our capital A is this. That A over there is going sort of like this, OK? Now the reason I want you to understand this is because you see letters around you all day long, and you may not realize that the letters are speaking to you through their body language. But I think you're going to realize it now. Every time you see letters in an ad in a magazine, a fancy magazine, you've got letters speaking to you through their body language. They're sort of like subliminally showing you a feeling or an idea. So my favorite place for seeing beautiful Roman capitals is in movie titles. There are a lot of movies out there that use the Roman capitals because they're such strong letters and they're so full of dignity and character. So that's what I mean by body language."