January journal (in December): the double-pencil trick

[ursula]

yhlee asked for a calligraphy post.

Here's something I learned from my middle-school art teacher that has come in handy for all sorts of signs and bits of art, over the years. Traditional calligraphy assumes you have a pen with an edged nib. If you want huge letters and you don't have a huge pen, you can hold two pencils together, and use those to calligraph an outline. The result (after closing off a couple of serifs) looks like this:



Then you can color in the letters however you like. In this case, I used sparkly watercolor:



Here is a less dimensional but even more sparkly image.

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