How to Flourish Calligraphy in Procreate – Real-Time iPad Lettering Layout Design

hi I'm Molly super Thorpe here on my channel I offer bite-size tutorials and demonstrations in hand-lettering and today I'm gonna bring you along with me as I create a flourished calligraphy layout design and procreate as I go I'll be providing commentary so that you can see and understand every step I make even my mistakes so let's dive right in I've already created for myself here an 8 by 10 inch art board and I've set myself up with 400 dpi and the reason for that is that I know that I don't know yet if I'm gonna print this or enlarge it one day so I like to have a really hefty dpi size so that I know that I can enlarge it later without fear of pixelation so if I come up here to canvas canvas information you can see here 8 by 10 400 dpi first what I'm gonna do for layout design is add a background grid for my letter layout and conveniently I have a lot of those actually that I give away for free to my newsletter subscribers honestly totally free no strings attached whatsoever so I'll link that down below in the description so that you can head over and how to look at them too but I'm gonna select my grid number 7 which is my basic modern calligraphy slant guide and then with magnetics and uniform turned on I'm just gonna pinch it and enlarge it so that it fills the screen it doesn't matter that it was originally a horizontal grid so if i zoom in here for you at home you can see that I have a base line and I have a nice little dotted slant line that I can generally adhere to but if you know my style you know that I have no qualms about disregarding grids and slants and all of that so long as I think that it looks good so with my grid layer placed I'll create a new blank layer and navigate to a pencil I have a lot of pencil brushes that I've personally customized for myself but lots of them come with procreate and honestly this is just for sketching so you can choose the pencil that you prefer if you're following along and I have myself set up with black color and I'm just gonna start sketching in very roughly the text that I want to calligraph today and I'm using a basic script style and at the end I'm gonna go into some ways that you can find inspiration for your own letter forms but first I'll just show you how I do it so let me just get started throwing some of my words in here I do not care at all that these are sloppy I'm not even actually trying to make them look good I'm trying to make sure that I know or I'm able to figure out at this point how many lines I'm gonna need how many words per line all of that stuff so that I can get things kind of centered and roughly laid out before I go in and make a lot of changes so I can already tell because I happen to know that my quote is kind of long that I'm gonna want something slightly smaller than this so I'll come up to my selection tool before I've even written out the entire quote and I'll shrink it I'll Center that and now knowing that I'm gonna keep it at least at this size I'll come to my grid and using the selection tool oops with even if I'm turned off I have it all freeform I'm gonna shrink this down so that the X height which is the space between two bass lines roughly sits in the x height of the letters that I just resized now my number one motto that if you've seen others of my videos you may know is new line new layer so I sketched out this line already so moving to my next line I'm creating a new layer for that I can tell you already I'm eventually going to want to shrink all this text one more time but let's keep going so that we can see just how much we're going to want to shrink it okay in fact I know already and then I'm gonna shrink this a lot so I'm gonna combine these down into a folder just moving all of my layers into this folder and reordering them as I go just because it's more convenient then I'll tap the group itself and my selection tool with magnetics turned on I'll shrink the whole thing and recenter it based on centering the top line okay I'll deselect come to my grid layer hit the selection tool and start shrinking down my grid so that again watching just the first line I can make sure that the base lines sit snugly on the base and top of the X height of my lowercase letters okay now I know that I'm going to need even more than this so I'm duplicating my grid selecting dragging it down it's fine tap merge down and now I have the larger grid the grid will ultimately go away so this is really just for the sake of my sketching okay now even though I haven't finished my quote and still just because I want to make sure I'm on the right track going through and slightly resizing slightly centering the lines I've already sketched and now I'll just keep going with my sketching okay everything's sketched out here and I'm zooming out and I can see immediately I space these lower lines closer together than I did the upper lines here I have two full lines in between the top and bottom but have three I'm sorry between the top and second line that I have three lines in between the next so because I want to flourish this a lot I'm going to give myself extra space so let me start by moving the first line up and I'll just free space these now I'm moving my whole group up a line because I want to put the credit mine turning off my gray that kind of helps me to see the spacing again just a little bit okay I'm gonna shrink the whole thing even more yeah I think that this will be very nice I'm gonna resize my grid one last time to fit my newly resized letters [Music] okay I think that that's a rather nice layout in terms of letters per line and really ugly sloppy calligraphy so far I like this sometimes what I would do is for example if one line looked a lot longer than the other I might go back at that point and move the last word from the long line onto the beginning of the next line it's that trouble but I don't think that I have to do that today with this so what I'll do now I hope you can see why I put each line on its own layer it makes it much easier to move things around and reward orient them but now that I've done that I don't need these on their own layers anymore so I'll flatten that group now this is just one layer I'll reduce the opacity ever so slightly and turn back on my grid make a new layer and I'm just gonna quickly go back over this one more time again with pencil just to really solidify a lot of the shapes and the spacing between words still I'm not adding flourishes you may find it a bit tedious but I find it quite meditative when it comes to my a senders and mighty senders at the top of this D or the tail of a why I'm not doing anything fancy I'm gonna go back and flourish them later but the point now is just to get sort of the letters properly oriented on the line and you know make sure that I have all of my spacing in place before I'm gonna go back and decorate you can see that as is very common I often end my new revised version slightly to the right of my previous because often when I'm sketching I tend to make my letters a little bit too narrow or the connections between letters a little bit too small here's a good example on this F I don't want to adhere to carefully to the grid but I do want to adhere somewhat and you can see that my sketched F has this access but my slant is this axis and that's just a little bit too different for my taste so when I go back to redo this I'm going to correct that access somewhat [Music] okay so here I really shrunk things too much in my initial one as I go I'm actually making my revised version absolutely over to the left so that I can keep a closer trace version of my lower layer [Music] [Music] okay zooming out now I'll turn off my draft layer I'll even turn off my grid for a second because that really helps me check on the layout now my goal is to critique my work and for my eye to zoom into places like this the space between these letters is much too big so making sure that I'm roughly roughly centered first then I'll go in and make these edits so I know that this is one two three four five the sixth line and I know that this is the layer I started with so one two three four five six that's the line and all I'm going to do is come to my selection tool I'll turn back on my grid selection tool and I'm just going to go through like this and fix the spacing between various words [Music] okay with that done I'll just do one last pass roughly centering things and I call this optical centering because if you actually centered this mathematically and perfectly to the eye given some curves and straight lines it actually might not look centered so it doesn't even matter if it's mathematically centered it matters if your eye can Center it so I'll just make sure I like how this looks so far and once you get the top layer centered you can kind of start centering the other lines below it knowing that we know we're gonna add some flourishes so things will change a little bit [Music] okay just a zoom around this a little bit for you to take a look here we have this still incredibly sloppy pencil version of the artwork now I'm gonna actually delete my first draft I don't need it and I'm going to flatten this into one layer and the quickest way is to actually pinch those layers together and now they're on one layer and I'm gonna make a new blank layer and sometimes I do this by eye if it's a larger file or I just have the time I do this by hand but I'm gonna turn on a really high contrast color and on a blank layer I'm gonna come around and I'm gonna start drawing in some flourishes that I could add here so this is for me the fun part and you know there's a lot of trial and error to figure out what you think is gonna look good but I just I recommend that you know this is the best type of flourishing practice it's like flourishing in the wild not just individual letters but flourishing in such a way that the words can sort of connect and that the lines can intertwine so let me just get started here actually I'm going to slightly reduce the opacity there we go so that this view show that I've chosen really pops out and sometimes rather than just flourishing this can mean sort of slightly refining the letter forms zoom in even more for your benefit these two a sender's here give me the opportunity to do something big so I think I'll choose to do something big with the age especially because this is the top line I get to have a lot of fun making something that really pops up above the a sundar height here with this I can have fun I'm not even going to separate these by line I'm just going to do this all on one layer you can see on this end and this w when a curve it's called an overturn is at the beginning of a word I often like to accentuate it a little bit if I can we'll add a little loop to this R and make it go below the baseline here I'm going to have a situation between the Y and the T where I'm going to have to choose whether I want to flourish the T or the Y because we can't have them intersect because I have a t here then I know I'll have the opportunity to flourish I'll choose the Y and I'll really do a nice flourish here that takes up a lot of the blank space between these two lines you can have so much fun with the first words of a line especially if they have an entry stroke like this like the F like an a is hard because it doesn't have a natural entry stroke but an F does so that makes it really fun and do too much refining of these drafts but when I know like I just did right now that I'm gonna want to make an edit I do that so I'm actually gonna shrink this tea slightly lower so that it's not going to touch the Y when I end up flourishing that wise tail sometimes I do if I have no other way to fill a space but like this G I can see that below I have a detour I'll have an opportunity to fill this a space so I'm not gonna force the G because it's in the middle of a word and instead I'm actually going to reduce it contrast is important so you don't want to flourish every a sender nd sender and and curl because when you actually do fewer and you make them really strategically placed then that's actually when it looks the most dramatic okay so here I gave myself that space for Adi planning in advance to flourish it here I have a nice opportunity for connected flourishing between the stroke of the T and the L so I'm going to see how I like that this is what I mean and I sort of locked like the word street is a great example and for calligraphers for whom stationary design is their bread and butter we get to write the word street a lot it's not really my bread and butter anymore it used to be the main thing I did at the beginning of my career but probably written the word street thousands and thousands of times zooming out I can see that I have basically chosen the same flourish for these three lines in a row and I don't like that at all so I'm gonna take my eraser I'm gonna enlarge it I'm gonna figure out a new solution for sure right here do not like floors just to repeat it makes them look more programmed and less natural less human and I'm probably gonna redo this one ok so let's fix that you can just make this sort of big without so much of a flourish yeah there I've reversed the loop here for this age that's gonna look better in fact yeah we'll make it connect in on that self this K I'll keep pretty low so that it doesn't intersect with that F but I will do something here with the W at the end though we use can have fun with little loops on them I'll keep this D small so that I can actually do something huge with the age I'll keep this L and this T kind of small and I'll do something huge with the Y it's a shame that I don't have anything on this side of the bottom line so let's figure out an entry strip for this a yeah even something simple like that isn't in prison that and I'm going to keep the byline Rachel's name unflushed okay now what I get to do is actually the fun part using my calligraphy pen I'm gonna reduce the opacity on both of these layers but I still have them both visible create a new blank layer and go to black little hack if you want pure black instead of coming over here and trying to pick it and make it being slightly off you can actually just double tap at the bottom and it snaps to pure black I'm gonna be using my own brush set here it's called the calligraphy nibs brush set and I have a fine point calligraphy pen in here I'll put the link in the description below if you want to buy this brush back to it comes with like what six calligraphy pens plus a bonus mono line pen but you can use any lettering brush that you like if you don't have my brush set okay and now I'm just gonna go through and this is the most relaxing part for me I'm just calligraph all of these you can take me a few tries by the way to get the right line width this is a very pressure sensitive brush we tried to design it to be as faithful to a calligraphy dip pen as possible so based on the size of the letters you may have to spend a little bit of time adjusting the brush size oh and of course the DPI of your file also matters to this so there's no one-size-fits-all for this you'll have to choose a custom size based on your design and here a lot of refining comes into place I mean this does take quite a bit of practice but there's no better way to practice in my opinion than to do exactly what I'm doing now making layouts and just sort of doing it but it does take practice to kind of know what refinements to make here as you go I mean no pencil is going to be as refined as a calligraphy pen so there was no point anyway earlier to try to make refined pencil new lime new layer with this brush that by the way just like with a real calligraphy pen if you slow down once you get to the bottom baseline you're gonna get that full nib with bottom to your stroke whereas just like with a calligraphy pen if you don't hold your pressure as you go down you're gonna get a tapered end so in this particular design I like to have this full and there width at the bottom [Music] [Music] okay great now I have traced over my two layers of pencil with my calligraphy brush and I'll just zoom around this for you to kind of see you can see how many places there are where I mean the obviously the calligraphy pen makes such a huge difference but where I just really refined as I went but on the other hand having that pencil template was invaluable I was able to just speed through the actual calligraphy pen process but she sees a lot slower than drawing the pencil so I'll turn off those two draft layers zoom out I'll turn off the grid and now I'm gonna do another once-over scan where I'm gonna look for words that are spaced too far apart lines that no longer look centered because flourishes may be taking up more or less of the left and right sides [Music] okay there we go so now of course if you had edits to the actual artwork like let's say you wanted to come in actually I'll show you yeah let's pretend that I want to redo this B and in fact I do now think that since I'm pre centered it the e looks a bit smushed and too close to the T so one method if you kind of want to base your redo on the previous version is simply to come to that layer and reduce its opacity dramatically create a new blank layer overhead and come back to your brush and then redo it by sort of tracing over your previous version but editing as you go right I know I like that a lot better so now I can select the layer below it and select my eraser tool erase the work underneath turn it back up the opacity shift this a slightly in place or I can extend slightly the connector stroke alright that looks much better so I'll tap it and merge down so that this layer is one piece again alright let's just take a little spin around what we've got here okay I think this is pretty good and if you know you're unhappy with your flourishes or anything like that I recommend doing a second colored pencil layer so just throw a blank layer on top of this make your changes with pencil and redo your calligraphy it's as simple as that I'm really a believer in pencil edits and drafts and sketching and all of that so I could call this done if I want or I could change the color and let me just quickly show you how to do that I always work with black and white for the contrast and you know the simplicity and honestly the beauty of it half the time that's what I want to keep but here we have all these layers you know not grouped together or anything so the first thing I want to do is group the layers I don't want to merge them because maybe one day I'm going to want to separate them again so I'm going to group them and I'm going to put them into the group bottom to top so that I'm organizing them as I go and you see that in fact the layers are numbered so this makes it quite easy as I was making them you have layer four five six and I'll just keep going and creating this group great now all of the layers are together in one group all right so to change the color of this let's say I want to reverse it and make the background black and the lettering white well I can create a new layer go to white top and fill then I do have to have a flattened layer to recolor it but I don't want to do anything destructive which means I don't want to destroy my broken-up layers so I'm gonna duplicate that group tap it and flatten it and turn off the group below it the full layout design is on one layer and then I'll tap my filled in color layer and do a clipping mask you can see I didn't choose a pure white but that's okay and now I'll tap the background color and I'll change it to anything that I want I like this charcoal and of course immediately I mean all calligraphers know this white on black just triples the elegance of any design you know and depending on your composition you kind of can't go wrong with it alright so there you go this is my process for creating a flourished calligraphy layout design in procreate and no matter the length of the quote or the composition I usually use this exact process of drafting in pencil and then moving on to the calligraphy nibs so remember that if you want to have my free lettering guide grid pack look down in the description for that link as well as my calligraphy nib brush set which is what I use today is the fine point calligraphy pen in the smooth stroke and I'll link that below as well if you want to grab it I want to end this video with a few ways that you can get inspiration to create different lettering shapes and kind of practice the actual letter forms of your modern calligraphy and the first is my newest book mastering modern geography where I have over 2700 different letters and ligatures with like connected letters you can go through and trace even get the eBook version and open it on your iPad to work with if you not - I even show the letters with arrows so that if you're new to this craft and you want to practice your strokes whether it's ink on paper or on the iPad you can go through this and pick up a lot of the letters after that after basic modern letter variations I have like a lot of different styles for you to look at and then like I said some words some phrases I have a mono line style and then I have even more sort of in-depth advice about creating layout designs not on the iPad per se but it can apply to iPad calligraphy but I did write it for calligraphers who are doing ink on paper designs back hand script advice about drawing in different layouts basically my goal with this was to overwhelm you with information and inspiration of different letters so that's that's a really great place to start if you're really looking for some very concrete inspiration or letters to copy in your practice and then the other place is my free tool kit which is the same tool kit where you can get the free grid sheets that I mentioned before and it's it's linked still down in the profile Mali's lettering tool kit and in that I already have a number of practice sheets and exemplars for a few modern styles and I do update that downloaded library often I add to it and I don't subtract anything so if you sign up and you get the downloads now then whenever I release a new product like new practice sheets or new procreate brushes you'll get an email letting you know and you can just go right away and download them for free so that's the free option and this book I've linked it down below for all sorts of places around the world to buy it this is a bit of an investment financially but something that you can keep next to you on your desk and hopefully look through for a lot of inspiration [Music]

Channel: Molly Suber Thorpe

Views: 8,120

Rating: 4.9548874 out of 5

Keywords: lettering, calligraphy, hand lettering, procreate, ipad, learn, how to, design, procreate tutorial, procreate ipad pro, procreate 5, how to use procreate, ipad pro, procreate art, procreate brushes, draw with me, procreate walkthrough, procreate time lapse, modern calligraphy, calligraphy writing, handlettering, calligraphy letters, calligraphy flourish, calligraphy flourishing, flourishing, calligraphy for beginners, calligraphy tutorial, how to flourish, digital, 2020

Id: yecyCi6vgNI

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020