Tip 5: Paper Placement
You’ve made it! Thank you for hanging out with me! This is last tip for the 5 tips you must know about pointed calligraphy before you start writing! And we’re going to talk about paper placement.
If you haven’t watched/read any of my previous tips yet, please go back and start from the beginning! We are building each tip upon the previous one so that they make sense! To do a quick recap, in the first tip, we talked about the properties of pointed pen letters, we focused mainly on the slant angle of the letters. In second tip, we went through the properties of a pointed pen nib and the importance of aligning nib angle to the script angle. Then we talked about pen hold. And in the previous tip we focused on sitting position. For this tip, we’ll talk about the last component, paper placement.
Let’s start
To start off from the very beginning, You’ll see (in the video) the edge of the desk, and position of the paper. My body, or the middle of my chest is pointed directly perpendicular to the desk. Just to show you before I make any adjustments, if I’m going to hold the pen as I mentioned in the third video, the nib is pointed away from the slant angle. There are three things I can change: the desk, yourself, and the paper. The desk is the hardest to change, so you can either rotate your body, or we can adjust the paper.
Without changing my sitting position, we will try to rotate the paper to align our nib to the angle of the script. As you see in the video, I will still need to rotate the paper quite a lot. But if I’m to hold the pen incorrectly, it will almost be upside down. So we will adjust our pen hold, and change our body to ensure support for our forearm. As mentioned previously, I like to turn my body so that my forearm is rest on the table. This helps a lot when you’re ready to tackle flourishes. So I turn my body, to point my chest 40 degrees to the left of the table. Which also means, I will have to rotate my paper 40 degrees more, in order to align my nib to the script.
Writing zone
One thing I want to talk about is the writing zone. It is the area where I am the most comfortable to write within. If I move too close, then my arm will be too close to my body and my shoulder will be lifted up. If I’m too far, I’ll have to lean into the desk in order for me to write. This means I will need to constantly adjust and move my paper into my writing zone in order to achieve the most comfortable writing area.
Always adjust the paper!
So the main takeaway of the video is: The paper is the easiest thing for you to move. So before you put you nib down, always look first to see if your nib is facing the angle of the script before you write.
And that all for my five tips video.
I hope you find this tip helpful. If you have any questions, please comment below or send me an email. And if you think someone else may find this helpful, please share with them my sign up link, so they can also receive my tips too! I want to say a special thank you for hanging out with me. I hope I explained myself well, I really appreciate your support. Also, if you have any suggestions for what I should share, don’t hesitate to let me know either. Until next time!
Previous tips:
Tip 1: Properties of Pointed Pen Letters
Tip 2: Properties of the Pointed Flexible Nib
Tip 3: How To Hold A Pointed Pen