When my followers first asked me to try a "5 days of calligraphy" challenge in my YouTube series "Try Living with Lucie," I was incredibly nervous. I've never had the world's neatest handwriting, and as I binge-watched hundreds of 'how-to' videos, I thought to myself, "I'll never ever be able to do that!"
But as I've come to realise, calligraphy can be broken down to its most basic form, and at the heart of it there's one main principle: thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes.
I went to the local art store to buy some traditional calligraphy supplies (a pen holder, a set of nibs and some black ink), and I started out by practicing basic strokes. Eventually, I was forming letters and testing out different types of pens.
My exploration this week taught me that the traditional forms of calligraphy (like Copperplate or Spencarian) are not right for me; I'm more interested in learning what's referred to as 'modern calligraphy' — a type of hand-lettering with looser restrictions than traditional forms of calligraphy. After playing around with various tools, I also learned that brush pens are my personal favourite — particularly the Tombow Dual Brush Pens and Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pens.
Check out the video to see my progress over the course of five days, and (now that I'm into hand-lettering and all) follow me on Instagram (@luciebfink) to see how my 2018 bullet journal is coming along.