Calligraphy

Calligraphy means beautiful writing and has its roots in the days which books were manually copied where the handwriting of the scribe mattered. In this age of computer lettering, the importance of hand lettering has been elevated and belittled at the same time, meaning that it has become unnecessary as art is.

This series will talk about western calligraphy as differentiated from Chinese calligraphy and Arabic calligraphy, together they are the 3 forms of calligraphy that are most widely practiced today.

The latin characters that are used in Europe and America have their roots in Greek and Roman (Latin). While the Greeks might not have been the first Western civilization to write, it is there script that has passed on to form the letters that we know today. Script, which is the font in which a piece of calligraphy is done since font is used in typography not calligraphy, is mainly divided into 2 types, cursive and print. The most practiced types of print are Roman, Uncial, Gothic and Italic; while roundhand, copperplate and Spencerian [and its many copycat-scripts] rank high among the most popular cursive scripts.

I will introduce each type of script starting with its history and development, followed by some examples and some pointers on how you can practice and write that script. I will hand letter all the examples in this series.

Calligraphy should be treated as an art, and the best works are definitely pieces of art. Calligraphy is not turning yourself into a type writer and putting perfect letter after perfect letter, it is about creating something beautiful using the shapes that people recognize as letters.