I do love plunging in to a project and just cracking on with it, but it’s sometimes my undoing. It turns out, I’ve been doing some of my letters wrong.
I was really struggling with forming half-decent letter shapes, especially the ‘e’ and some of the upstrokes, so I went back to the handbook (pdf) that I had previously only glanced at. In said handbook, I found this:
A point of confusion for many novices is the direction of the individual pen strokes. As I stated in the first chapter, Engrosser’s script is not handwriting. We are literally ‘drawing’ the letters. Therefore, a different approach is needed to accomplish this. The technique involves creating letters using a series of strokes.
Oops.
I’ve been trying to do everything as if it’s handwriting, and it’s not. So, back to basics then. Yesterday, which I did not have time to blog, I tried to do what is for me the hardest of the basic forms, the downstroke with the top loop, which should be done as per this diagram:
As you can see, the tall loopy figure is a wedge-shaped downstroke with a fine up-and-round-and-downstroke. It’s that latter bit that I seriously struggled with, and particularly joining it up at the top of the wedge and getting a fluid top part of the loop. (Also I tried that red ink again.. still a no go, though, it just floods the paper then runs out. )
So today, I had a proper go at this set of basic shapes. Still struggling with that P-shape, but am improving.
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