How to Do Faux Calligraphy

Work on paper with lines. You need a baseline for the letters to sit on and a header line for the x-height to reach, and slanted lines help you keep a consistent angle across the whole word.

Ordinary ruled notebook paper is enough to start. Printable calligraphy guide sheets give you the slant lines too, and if you are practising regularly they are worth printing a stack of.

Monoline just means the line does not change width no matter how you push the pen. A fineliner, a gel pen, a pencil, a ballpoint from the kitchen drawer. All fine. This is the entire appeal of faux calligraphy: no special tools.

A dual-tip pen like the Tombow Monotwin is handy because the fine end draws the outline and the fatter end fills the thick sections in, but you can do the whole thing with one pen and a bit more patience.

The first shape is the easiest: a thin line curving upward from the baseline. It is the little lead-in that starts most lowercase letters and joins one letter to the next.

It stays thin, always. There is no downward movement in it at all, so when you go back to add weight later this shape gets nothing. That is worth noticing now, because it is the clearest example of the rule.

Three more shapes. The underturn is a U that starts at the header line, dips to the baseline and comes back up. The overturn is the same thing upside down. The oval is an o, drawn in one direction so you always know which side is the downstroke.

Fit each one between the baseline and the header line, leaning on the same slant. Getting them all the same size and the same angle is more of the work than getting the shapes right.

The compound curve is an underturn running straight into an overturn, which is what the middle of an n or an m is made of. Then the two loops: an ascending loop that climbs above the header line, and a descending loop that drops below the baseline.

Mark an A line above and a D line below your normal writing lines so the loops have somewhere consistent to reach. Every ascender in a word should hit the same height, and every descender the same depth.

Here is the whole technique in one line. Go back over each shape and add weight to any part of it where the pen travelled downward. Upward and sideways movement stays thin.

Go through the seven shapes and mark them off. The entrance stroke went up only, so nothing. The underturn came down and back up, so the first half gets weight. The overturn went up, over and down, so the last half does. The oval has a downstroke on one side only. Once you see it this way you never have to guess again.

This is where most people go wrong. Add the thickness on the inside of the shape, running along the existing downstroke, so the outside edge of the letter does not move.

Draw it on the outside and the letter grows. Do that inconsistently across a word and the letters end up different widths, which reads as wobbly even when every individual shape is fine. Keeping the outline fixed and eating inward keeps the whole word even.

All the thick sections in a word should be the same weight as each other. This is easy on a single shape and surprisingly hard across a whole word, so check it as you go.

The compound curve is the awkward one. Its downstroke sits in the middle of the shape with a hump on either side, so adding weight to just one side leaves the two humps different widths. The fix is to widen the first hump slightly as you draw the shape, then bring the shade inward. Alternatively add half the thickness to each side of the line, though that leaves a faint line down the middle if you are not filling the shape solid.

On both stem loops, stop the returning line just short of where it would meet the loop. That small gap gives the shade somewhere to go without a hard line running through the middle of the loop.

Make the loops a bit wider than feels natural too. Adding weight to the inside of a tight loop closes the hole up completely and you lose the shape.

Fill a page with the seven shapes, then another. Every letter in the alphabet is these shapes joined together, so time spent here is not practice for the real thing, it is the real thing.

Once the shapes and the shading feel automatic, start on letters. Three at a time is plenty. The hand learns this the way it learns anything physical, by repetition rather than by understanding.