Scribblers Calligraphy Blog

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Roman Capitals – Serifs

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Serifs are small strokes added to letters to ‘finish’ the letter. They can enhance the letters, but if produced badly will spoil the letter rather than ‘finishing it’.

You need to be careful when adding serifs. If they are too big they can distract from the letterform and can even alter the final shape of the letter.

Some letters do not have serifs, for example ‘C’ and ‘O’

The most popular styles of serifs are the hook and slab.

Hook Serifs

These are the easiest style of serif to produce. They appear at the start and/or end of a straight pen-stroke. It’s important to make these serifs small. When producing the hook shape it can help to visualise a small circle, which you trace round with the pen. Otherwise this circle shape can be too big, which will make the serif too large.

Hook serifs are made at the same time as the main pen stroke rather than afterwards. For example, both serifs on the letter ‘I’ and the letter itself is produced with one pen-stroke.

Slab Serifs

Slab serifs are small straight lines and are added after the letter has been produced rather than at the same time as the main stroke. So a letter ‘I’ would be made from three pen-strokes.

It’s better to flatten the pen angle for these serifs as leaving the pen at 45 degrees can make the serif look to ‘heavy’ or ‘chunky’. With slab serifs be careful not to construct them off centre, which will spoil the letter.

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Roman Capitals – Letter and Word Spacing

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Many calligraphers put all their effort in to producing correctly proportioned letterforms. Whilst the letters are very important, bad letter and word spacing will distract from the lettering. Can you imagine looking at a piece of work with beautiful lettering only to be distracted by poor spacing? Spacing can make or break a piece of work. It is advisable to spend much time learning the correct spacing for the style of writing.If you learn the spacing rules early on you can apply them whilst you are practising your letterforms. So instead of just writing one letter after another, you also think about where the second letter being practised should start relative to the previous letter. Spacing rules vary with different styles of writing. With Roman Capitals the space between letters should be such that there is an equal area between the letters. Letter spacing should be adjusted such that the area between any two letters is equal. There should be an even-looking space between and around the letters.

Letter Spacing

Two straight letters are furthest apart

If you start with two ‘straight’ letters N and N, there will be an area between these letters. The two straight letters are 5/8 the height of the letter apart. So, if you had an x-height of 10mm the distance between the straight letters would be 6mm.If you produced these letters on a piece of graph paper you could add up all the (millimetre) squares and you would know the area between the letters.

A straight and a curved letter are slightly closer together

The distance between a straight letter and a curved letter is adjusted such that the area between the letters is the same as two straight letters. For example, a curved letter O will be will closer to the straight letter N than another straight letter. Why is this?Well, remember, we are dealing with the area between letters and so we have to allow for the space at the top and bottom of the curved letter. All the partial squares along with the whole squares created by our two letterforms needs to add up to the same number of squares (area) as our two straight letters.

Two curved letters are closest together

When writing two curved letters together, for example O and another O they will be close together. This is because we need to allow for the area above and below each curved letter. Keeping with the graph paper idea we now have lots of partial squares created by the curved shapes. However, if we could add all these fragments up, it should still be the same area as the two straight letters. Some combinations of letters are relatively easy to space, other letter combinations are more difficult. The problems start when you have letters, for example, C followed by a Y or an E next to a J. With the type of combinations you have to consider the space inside the letters. In practice this means some letters are written very close together. Examples include ‘TT’ ‘RY’. This is because the letters have a lot of space associated with them meaning if the spacing rules were applied there would not be an evenness of space. The letters are close together because the eye reads part of the space within the letter area together with the interletter space.

Word Spacing

The letter O is used as a guide for the inter-word spacing. However, this will also need adjusting depending upon the last letter of the word and the first letter of the next word. This can result in the word spacing being reduced to compensate for the space around some letters.

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Roman Capitals – Order and Directions

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Once the proportions of the Roman Capitals have been studied, the next step is to start writing the letters. Each letter is constructed rather than written. The letters are made up from a combination of pen strokes. With this style of lettering, the pen strokes are only made in a top – down or left – right direction. The pen is never pushed up. When we studied the proportions of the Roman Capital letters we could group them according to their widths. Now, we can group the letters according to the order and direction of the pen strokes. The first group consists of the letters C, D, G, O, and Q These letters are based on the circle shape. This shape is produced with two pen strokes. If you imagine a clock face, the start of the first stroke is at approximately the 11, and finishes in an anti-clockwise direction at 5. The second stroke starts again at the 11 and finishes on the 5, but is produced in a clockwise direction. The second stroke on the C and G is shorter and the letters G and Q have a third stroke to complete the letter. The letter D is made from 2 pen strokes. The first stroke is a vertical down-stroke and then across to give an ‘L’ shape. The second pen stroke is similar to the second stroke of the other curved strokes.

The second group consists of the letters B, E, F, L, P and R The letter L is straight forward. This made up from one stroke and is a vertical down-stroke and then across to give an ‘L’ shape. The letter E also starts like this with a second and third stroke added to complete the letterform. The letter F is just a vertical stroke with the second and third stroke added to complete the shape. The letter B starts the same as the letter L. Then, the two round circular shapes of the B are produced from one pen stroke. The letters P and R are based on the letter B, except only the top circular shape is made. The letter R needs a third pen stroke to complete the shape.

The next group of letters are A, M, V, W, X and Y These letters all include diagonal pen strokes, which always start at the top and goes down. The letter V is made from two diagonal pen strokes. The letter W is to letter V’s ‘stuck together’. Start the letter M, with a near-vertical pen stroke. This is followed by the V shape. The letter is completed with another almost vertical stroke. The letter X is just 2 diagonal strokes that cross. The letter Yis a shortened V shape, completed with a short vertical stroke. The letter A is in this group, because it is an upside-down V shape, and has a short horizontal pen stroke to complete the letterform.

The letters H, I, J, N, T, U and Z are in the next group. The letters H and N start the same way, with 2 vertical strokes, which are ¾ of the height of the letter apart. They are completed with a third, straight pen stroke for the H or diagonal for the N. The letter T is straight-forward, after the vertical stroke is produced, a second stroke is made which needs to be in length ¾ the height of the first stroke. The letter Z consists of 2 horizontal ¾ width pen strokes, joined by a diagonal stroke. The letter I is straight-forward! U starts with a vertical line that picks up the underlying circle on the grid. A second pen stroke is made ¾ of the height of the letter apart. The letter J is made up from 2 pen strokes. The first is a vertical stroke that stops short of the write line. The second stroke starts approximately the distance of ½ the height of the letter away from the end of the first stroke. It curves, touches the write-line and touches the bottom of the first stroke.

Finally, S and K These letters don’t really belong to any of the previous groups. K is made up of 3 straight pen strokes; the first is a vertical stroke, the second stroke touches the first stroke just above the half-way mark. The third stroke starts where the second stroke finished and goes out slightly further out than the second stroke before touching the write-line. Finally, the letters S, the hardest letter to learn? This is a half-width letter, so quite narrow. It may help you to visualise the number 8 when producing the letter. The first pen-stroke is a ‘snake’ shape and starts just below the body-height of the letter and finishes just above the write-line. The second stroke, starts at the top of the first stroke and is curved. Finally, the third stroke starts at the bottom of the first stroke and curves – touching the write-line before it meets up with the end of the first stroke.

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Roman Capitals – Proportions

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Roman Capitals are usually the first style of calligraphy to be taught to the students of a new class. This is not always the case and there have been debates in the past to which is the best style to start with. Anyway, we are going to study Roman Capitals. We could just pick up a calligraphy pen and make a start with some sample sheets, but this will not produce such good lettering as taking our time and learning the proportions of each letter. Roman Capital Letters have different widths; the obvious example is the letter ‘I’ compared to the letter ‘M’. The good news is that each letter can be grouped according to its widths. So, instead of having 26 letters of different widths, there are in fact only 4 groups of letters.
The Grid To help get these widths correct we can construct a grid, where each letter can be placed inside. The grid consists of a square and inside it a circle that just touches the lines of the square in four places. Within the square, there is also a rectangle. This rectangle is three quarters the size of the square and is positioned in the centre of the square.
Groups of Letters The first group of letters; O, C, D, G, Q are widest letters and all pick up the circle at some point, although obviously O and Q follow the whole circle. The other letters in this group are not the full width of the square. If they were, they would look too big.

The second group of letters; are known as the three-quarter width group because they all fit in the rectangle part of the grid. The letters in this group are H, A, V, N, T, U, X, Y, Z. The letters in this group are probably the easiest to learn.

The third group of letters are known as the half-width group because all the letters fit in approximately half of the grid. The letters in this group are B, P, R, E, F, L, K, S, J. Most people find these letters harder to learn. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, they do not fit in the grid as well as the three-quarter width group letters. Secondly, many of the letters in this group include curved/round pen strokes. i.e. the letters B and S. B, P and R are very similar. To learn the proportions of the letter B, try and visualise 2 circle shapes, one on top of the other. The top circle is slightly smaller than the bottom circle (the centre of these circles has been shown by the 2 red crosses). If the vertical stroke of the letter B started at the edge of the grid the letter would look too wide. Also, if it started on the vertical line of the rectangle the letter would be too narrow. Once you have studied the letter B, the letters P and R become much easier to learn.

The 2 circles used for letter B, can also act as visual aid for the sizes of the different parts of the letters E, F, L and K. If you can imagine squares that fit exactly to the circles you can judge how far out the horizontal strokes on the E, F and L go. Also, from these squares you can judge the length of the two strokes of the letter K. The bottom stroke of the K will go further out than the top stroke. If they were in line then the letter would look like it was about to topple over. The letter S is based on two different sized circles on the right-hand side of the grid. Again the top circle is smaller than the bottom circle. The letter J picks up and leaves the bottom circle to get the hook shape.

We are now only left with three letters; I, M and W. These letters do not belong to any of the three groups because they are all odd sizes. The letter M is the width of the square on our grid, the V shape being exactly the same as the letter V. This means the two vertical strokes of the letter M are in fact not vertical! A common mistake is to make the letter too wide by writing two upside-down ‘V’s.

The letter W is just two V letters ‘stuck’ together. So, this is the widest letter of the alphabet. Finally, we are left with the letter I, which is just a vertical stroke!