It's Time to Flourish the World!
What good are flourishes if you can’t impress the world with your mad skillz y’all?! The most impressive way to use flourishes are by connecting the tail flourish of one letter to the cross stroke of another letter.
YOUR TOOLS
Today your tools are going to be the skills that you’ve already mastered. You know lettering and you know basic flourishing and now it’s time to combine all that and let the magic happen.
CHEATER’S REMORSE
Cheating, shmeating. This is going to be all you baby!!
THE LINES
Just so we have all the technical terms nailed here, a cross stroke is the line the crosses over a “t”. This is one of the easiest places to start adding flourish connectors because it is easy to create a flowing tail off of a separate letter that can also look like a natural cross for a “t”.
WATCH OUT AND WATCH IT!
The most important thing to keep in mind is to only do this tail/cross-flourish combo when it is a natural fit. Keep your flourish gentle and extended and the outcome will look effortless!
When I’m creating a piece, I like to sketch it out without flourishes so I can see where everything falls. But I definitely keep in mind trying to line up my letters to allow for tail/cross-flourish combos! Usually I will sketch it out with pencil, create a flourish that I love and then redraw it with ink. I do this simply because it allows me the flexibility to play around with my flourish and letter placement before I am committed to it.
WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT
If you’re finding this tricky when you go to ink your final piece, first letter out the letters but leave out the tail/cross-flourish. Simply leave a blank space for it so that you can come back and ink that in at the end.
I also like to “ghost draw” it in first. That means that, without putting my pen to the paper, I sketch the flourish out in the air just above my paper. This allows me to visualize the flourish and warm up my muscle memory before I hit the paper up with the ink.
THE NEXT STEP
Your next step is to keep practicing these flourishes. Push yourself and see just what you can create with the tools that you’ve mastered in only one week!! I’m sure that you’re now doing some flourishing that even you are impressed with. And, if it’s not easy yet, I promise it will become easy! It’s all about getting that muscle memory and training your arm to create beautiful, flowing lines.
WHAT’S COMING UP
There is so much more that you can do with flourishing and many more styles of flourishing to master!
I go even further in depth into flourishing and composition in the Intermediate Course Combo Masterclass. This class is different than any others because I am there beside you giving personalized feedback, teaching live in addition to recorded videos and taking you from basics to amazeballs in only 6-8 weeks. I have so many more secrets to teach you!!
Don’t miss out on the next Intermediate Course Masterclass registration! A limited number of spots are only open for one week and they fill up quickly. Get your name on the waitlist to get registration access one day early.
