Video: Using Guidelines to Master Calligraphy

Make sure letters stay basically within the guidelines. Learn about calligraphy and tips for mastering handwriting from a calligrapher in this free art video.

Video Transcript

And there's another point that I would like to make too which is that where you have a part of a letter that comes to a point, which it does here, you might want to think about letting that point come down slightly below your guideline. So what would be on the M for example, it's going to come to play on the N. It comes into play on the A. Why? Because if we were to draw it so that it just hit at the guideline, then it would, from a distance, it would read as if it is actually a shorter letter. And one of the things that we want to do, at least with our model while we're being so very precise about everything is to make sure that everything stays basically within the guidelines. That helps with legibility. So here's our M, and our magic M words, oh look at this: the word mindfulness. Very very important idea if you want to become a calligrapher. You really have to be mindful at all times of what you're doing. And I suppose everybody wants to master something that they're studying. I certainly am after mastery in calligraphy, and every once in a while I feel like I am getting somewhere with it. Mastery is very elusive because you get to a certain point where you think you know something and then you realize that you don't know as much as you, oh this is a bigger deal, this is, there's more to it. In the Tai Chi world, there's a very important person in my lineage called Professor Ching Mon Ching, and he says when you can enact what you think, then you are at the highest level. So I think that that's appropriate also for calligraphy.

Using Guidelines to Master Calligraphy

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