Pointed Pen Calligraphy: Drilling Away

Mar 6

Written By Stacey

Let’s talk drills.

No, not the drills you can use for engraving…although that would probably be a livelier discussion.

The drills I am referring to are the basic strokes of calligraphy. They must be like the brussel sprouts to the meat and potatoes of a steak dinner. Good for you, but definitely not the reason your mouth waters. 🤮

I actually like brussel sprouts, but that is beside the point…

I have been working on drills, trying to commit exemplars to memory, and practicing putting strokes together throughout the week. The photo above is this week’s bounty.

A friend and I briefly talked drills this week. She’s an experienced calligrapher and engraver. She didn’t use drills to learn and her calligraphy is beautiful. 😍 So, everyone’s path is different. Drills don’t hurt. But they’re not a must-do for everyone. I wish my brain and hand just synced with calligraphy, and maybe that will come with time. But, for now, my brain needs a jumpstart sometimes before I can marry it to my hand and drive the two of them somewhere useful. Drilling helps.

At school, I use my pencil when I get to sit at morning duty or at lunch. I have taken the pointed pen out at school too…These days, exhaustion kicks in when I hit the door at the end of a workday and it’s great to get a practice in during my wake/working hours, or it may not happen at all. But, pointed pen on a work break is just not as practical as pencil. I love pencils! 🥰

See some drills below from the middle of last week and then again from last night.

Even though I’m allergic to drills, I have to admit, they do help build muscle memory faster for me, personally, than my free-for-alls that I revert to when my brain has had enough structure. I think I’m the kind of person that needs both.

Amongst the benefits of using drills are:

less stress trying to create something perfect,
additional experience with getting the ink from the nib to flow well on materials that are low to no-risk,
cursive slippage prevention 😂 (calligraphy and cursive are not the same and it’s easy to slip into cursive when doing calligraphy without practice/experience deliberately avoiding the habit…it’s a thing),
practice keeping with the slant (soooooo challenging),
experimentation time to learn the materials you like working with best, and
muscle memory…though I think that varies from person-to-person.

I think these are the best reasons for why drills could be used for beginners.

Case in point, I got a little gift for Women’s History Month from our administrative assistant.

She’s so sweet! She’s my biggest cheerleader at work! We all need people like that.

On that post-it note attached to the candy bar, she wrote a little note and drew a heart. In parenthesis, she wrote that she isn’t much of an artist lol.

So, while I didn’t feel exactly ready to make a beautiful, calligraphic composition…I couldn’t resist the idea of leaving her a piece of art with a joke on the back that read, “Sometimes, I do art.” Just couldn’t help it. 🤷🏾‍♀️

Somewhere, I had seen where pencil is used to layout a calligraphic composition with pointed pen, kind of like a draft before engraving…and, I figured, since I had already been using pencils to practice, what the hay?

This is what I ended up with…

In this photo, I had started trying to ink it…and I did finish that. But, I realized that it wasn’t going to make a difference anyway using a light pad to transfer the drawing to better paper.

Lesson learned.

Eventually (because we are not even going to get into how many times I had to trace it in this post 😳), after tracing it with my light pad, I was able to get something I felt was acceptable to give.

I was going for a more modern calligraphy look here and I thought it came out pretty cute…Although I’m sure a year from now I’ll be wondering what I ever saw in it. 🙈

Either way, as much as I loathe drills, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to try this without them.

In searching for models to practice, I found a few great places to collect free printables and resources for drills and practice. I’m listing them below:

The Postman’s Knock Pencil Calligraphy Practice Sheet
The Zanerian Manual and Script in the Copperplate Style (Copperplate)
Calligrafile (list of practice sheets)

There are many tools and practice sheets made for Procreate too. I resort to the iPad when I don’t feel like scraping my bottom up from the sofa during a Netflix binge. But, by far, my favorite iPad tool for drills is The Calligraphy Composition Maker by Molly Suber Thorpe. I can have a grid with practice letters, numbers, and flourishes, as well as blank grids that I can fill in on my own. Pretty cool!