How To Do Faux Calligraphy Using 3 Techniques

Fake it till you make it! Have you heard of that phrase before? I have so many times. How To Do Faux Calligraph Using 3 Techniques. I promise you these techniques are so easy to follow. You will be on your way to learning how to do calligraphy with just a pencil. Yes, it’s that simple!

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First, check to see what supplies you have at home. All you need is a pencil or pen and some paper. That’s pretty much all you need! You could even use your kids crayons if you like to make it even more fun and colorful! So grab them so we can go on to the next step. 

First STEP in learning Faux Calligraphy, 

On a sheet of blank paper. This can be either your printer paper, notebook paper, journal or so on. 

Materials used in images below,

Pen

Rhodia Dot Pad

You need to learn the basic first of calligraphy. What’s important is knowing your basic strokes. I will share with you here and you can learn the others by reading my blog post on “How To Do Brush Lettering: I’m a Newbie, Teach Me!”   

First basic stroke is the Up Stroke in calligraphy: 

Video below,

Up strokes will always be thin lines.  Light pressure going up.

Second basic stroke is the Down Stroke in calligraphy: 

https://streamable.com/yymv1

Down strokes will always be thick lines.  Pressure going down stroke.

Now that you have the very basic most strokes of calligraphy, lets’ fake it!

Second STEP in learning Faux Calligraphy, 

Using your pencil or pen write the word, “calligraphy”. Now the best way of doing this is its sort of like writing in cursive, but instead of the scribble or the way you would sign your signature. Slowly write the word “calligraphy” as in my example below. It does not have to be perfect so don’t worry about how your letters look just yet. The final step is really going to transformed the way your letters appear. 

Third STEP in learning Faux Calligraphy, 

Using the basic strokes we’ve learned above you will need to make parallel lines either the inner part of your letters or outer part.

Remember how you wrote the word, up stroke = thin lines; down stroke = thick lines. Here is an example of the letter “c” below. 

https://streamable.com/6a2ac

Here is the final look of how the word calligraphy should look. You notice the difference from when you wrote the word. You can now see the thicker (parallel lines) vs the thin stroke lines going up.

As you notice I drew a line inner of “c” in the direction I would write the letter. 

You need to do this for each letter in the direction of which the letter would be written. You know how you learned to form your alphabets as a child in school. This is exactly what I mean by writing your letters in the direction to form them. 

Once you completed the parallel line for each letter whether it was inner or outer. You know have created Faux Calligraphy.  See my example below of the word, “calligraphy” in Faux Calligraphy. 

See I told you, you could do it!

Optional STEP,

https://streamable.com/7vajm

You can fill in the parallel lines to give it more of a calligraphy look if you like, see in my example below:

Practice these 3 techniques using other words and you will be able to write out your favorite quote. 

Let me know how this technique was helpful to you in the comments below. 

With love & purpose, 

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