DOMESTIKA COURSE – ENGLISH CALLIGRAPHY – COMPLETING THE CAPITAL LETTERS
Today, after a couple of days’ break due to busy-ness and fatigue, I was back in the studio again, completing the capital letters. I still need to do a lot of practice before moving on.
Warm-Up
A few pattern variations today, just to keep things interesting.
Group 5: H, K, V and W
H was a complicated letter which I made a mess of to start with. Then I decided to break it down and practise the initial element first, before moving on to complete the letter.
The letter K is very similar to the H, with just the addition of the loops on the right-hand side. You begin it in the same way as the H.
There are two versions of the letter V. I didn’t much like the first one as the loops on the left made it look too much like a Y, so I stuck with the second version. The same two variations apply to W, and both work well.
Group 6: A, M and N
There are two variations of the letter A – the plain version, and the one with the little canopy on the left. This was my favourite so I stuck with that. All the letters in this group are very similar to draw.
Group 7: I, J, O, Q, S and Z
A lot of letters in this group, but more similar in pairs, i.e. I and J, O and Q, S and Z.
You can see that the S and Z practice lines at the bottom are very squashed up vertically. When the letters occupy the full height of both ascender and descender, you end up with a lot of wasted space on the practice sheet if you try and avoid this. You can see this in action with the first three lines on this sheet. I’m not too worried about the crowded look when it happens because it saves paper, and this is only practice anyway.
Group 8: U, X and Y
As with the letter G which also has a tail, the letter Y has two alternative forms. With both these letters, I prefer the long tail, and shall continue to use this.
I continued to make quite a lot of mistakes with these practice sheets but I hope to improve things with more practice. I need to be able to write all the letters, both capitals and lower case, without having to think about the size of loops and which way they go, and so on!
Group 8 continued
Even with this extra practice I still made mistakes. Practise, practise, practise!
Looking forward to finishing this unit
This unit of the course is very long. There are so many different groups of capital letters. Still to come is a lesson on how to connect them with the lower case letters following them, making words. Once I’ve looked at that, and also the alternate forms that the teacher wants to show us, I shall put in a lot of practice before moving on to the next unit. I need all these letters firmly under my belt before progressing any further! There is still quite a lot to accomplish if I am to finish this course before the end of the month.
