I first heard about the Brause Steno nib in Molly Suber Thorpe’s Modern Calligraphy book. I immediately wanted to try it based on its nickname alone: “The Blue Pumpkin”. You know us Americans … “pumpkin” anything, and we’re so there (especially around this time of year; but I digress). In today’s post, I’d like to discuss my experience using the Brause Steno with you, and hopefully help you to decide whether this is a nib that you’d like to add to your collection or not.
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Halloween has always been my favorite holiday because … candy. It also offers the opportunity to make some playfully macabre creative projects (while you eat the candy)! Today’s blog post outlines my seven favorite Halloween paper projects on the TPK site. You can start making them now so the holiday doesn’t sneak up on you!
I love how embellished sugar skulls have seeped over from Día de los Muertos into Halloween decor and costumes. It’s hard not to admire a colorful sugar skull design! With that in mind, I wanted this year’s set of Halloween printables to call back to the sugar skull tradition. The subject of the illustration featured in the printables is a cat — an animal long associated with Halloween — and a sugar skull-inspired design!
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The Not Your Average Calligraphy Drills: Spooky Edition is now available!
Halloween has always been very big in my family. We love decorating the house with the macabre (I’ve got my Frida Kahlo skull on display) and — more importantly — getting to decorate ourselves! It’s freeing to step out of your comfort zone and be a little bit silly.
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If there’s one electronic item that I absolutely love, it’s my printer. Printers can make many projects cheaper and a lot more convenient! I take advantage of printables all the time for both important utilizations and not-so-important utilizations, and today I wanted to make a list to give you ideas for how to use printables, too.
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Elisabeth Young of ElisaAnne Calligraphy helped me out a lot with photos for this blog post — I want to extend a huge thanks to her!
If you’re a lefty, you are already aware that you’re in the minority. That has, unfortunately, probably led to frustration in your left-handed calligraphy learning endeavors. Hopeless as it may seem, I promise you that anyone — right- or left-handed — can create calligraphy! For this blog post, I decided to go to the source, and I asked south paw newsletter subscribers about their experiences with writing left-handed calligraphy. I received quite a few responses discussing issues and struggles when writing, tips and tricks for improving lettering, plus some examples of work. This blog post is a compilation of the most important takeaways.
I have several blog posts on the TPK website that teach you how to write calligraphy with a dip pen. Today, though, I want to give the spotlight to a different tool — the brush pen! I have written a general overview of brush pens before, but today I want to focus on using brush pens for calligraphy in particular. Flexible tips, quick-drying ink, and familiarity (since you’ve probably worked with markers before) make brush pens a wonderful candidate for not only creating modern calligraphy — but also for learning how to create modern dip pen calligraphy!
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In January 2017, I wrote another article that was also titled “How to Learn Calligraphy in Two Months”. The response was interesting: beginners were encouraged, but a small handful of seasoned calligraphers were outraged — I remember one fellow on Facebook got angry and vowed to stop following TPK. “You can’t learn calligraphy in two months, and furthermore, not just anyone can learn it!” he scoffed before his exit.
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I don’t know about you, but my interest in calligraphy and hand-lettering actually stemmed from a love of writing letters. As a young child, it amazed me that something I created could end up anywhere I wanted it to! I still get a thrill when I send off a letter or open my mailbox and see that I’ve received something.
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If you’re going to be part of a wedding soon — yourself or someone else’s — then you’ll enjoy these ten artistic wedding invitation ideas! Elegant and refined, they’ll flex your creative muscle. No one will guess that they were budget-friendly or DIY!
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