by Nina Drozd

Created on: May 05, 2009   Last Updated: May 13, 2009

The art of ink lettering, also known as calligraphy is not as easy as may seem after looking at it. Indeed, the professional calligraphers make the process of calligraphy look so graceful and quick, however after that fast and beautiful type of art are years and years of practice.

To begin calligraphy it is often a good practice to buy a calligraphy pad and an ink pen with a few nibs. Be careful to get an appropriate ink pen for yourself, according to your main writing hand (yes, there are left-handed pens, and a right-handed pen would be extremely uncomfortable to use for a left-handed person). Calligraphy pad is merely a specifically ruled notepad. It has a distinct feature of different sized horizontal lines for different parts of the writing, be it the main part of the letter or the under and over bits. These calligraphy utensils, as well as some calligraphy markets of different colours can be found in any art and craft store. If not sure, ask the assistant. It is also important to either purchase or borrow from the library or fish out from Internet archives, the very guide for calligraphy. There are many guides with different fancy writing styles, however they all have the most important basic writing styles to practice.

So now that you've purchased all the needed material for your calligraphy, it is time to start practising. The first steps in any type of art or anything that we learn for that reason are always the most basic ones. So to start your practice, go through all the alphabet, starting with lower case letters and write a few lines of them, perfecting each letter until you're happy with it. The start of calligraphy can seem boring or annoying but you do have to go through the alphabet and the stage of perfection to achieve good level of calligraphy, so if bored or tired, leave it until the next day. Next, write out some uppercase letters. This will already seem easier as you've practiced before. After this, the numbers and symbols and once you're happy with them, the hardest part is done!

It is important to remember that to achieve good results in calligraphy, you must be patient with this art and try your best to perfect it. The direction of letters (straight or a to the right) has to be the same in all the letters. The letters with upper and lower "tails" need to have the same size tails (use the horizontal lines of your calligraphy notepad for reference). Also, letters like "o" and "a" have to be done carefully so that all the instances of those letters have the same curved line or oval or circle effect. Lastly, good luck!

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