So, the last blog post of the semester. Feels strange to think about it, especially because it feels like last week when I was still contemplating what I should make my passion blog about. But regardless, 15 weeks have come and gone in this class and it culminates with one final blog post.

Keeping in tradition with the holidays and because ’tis the season, I decided to make my final calligraphy work Christmas-inspired.

Even though I don’t celebrate Christmas, I still wanted to make something that I could use to wish a merry Christmas upon others with.

So continuing with the more geometric (blocky) style that I used previously, I simply wrote “Merry Christmas” as two separate lines in the middle of a page with red ink, as red is basically the primary color of the holiday. After doing so, I went back with a green marker and drew very thin outlines on the left parts of the letters, to give the phrase a 3D feel to it, making it have some dimension.

After adding the depth to the lettering, I still felt that I could do more to give it holiday spirit, instead of just using two separate colors to write “Merry Christmas”. So, as anyone would, I drew a candy cane under the lettering, as a sort of underlining for the phrase. And after that, I drew a cartoonish mistletoe towards the upper left of the frame of the phrase to even out the empty space that was open to the right of the word “Merry”. Once the mistletoe was done, I wanted to add one more finishing touch, which was the red corners that I added to the top left and bottom right of the paper to quite literally frame the entire thing.

Throughout these weeks, I have genuinely found enjoyment in regularly practicing calligraphy and finding new ways to do something that I thought I already knew a lot about. Dabbling in different fonts and styles allowed me to gain a substantial amount of experience that I hope to build upon in the coming years. Calligraphy instruction is something that’s always been a goal of mine to complete, not as an occupation, but rather as a pastime to enable others to participate in an art form that I am incredibly passionate about.

As a send off, I’d like to recommend calligraphy to all of you. While it may seem complicated, it’s literally as simple as holding a pen at an angle and moving your entire arm along the paper to make a straight line. When I started doing calligraphy in eighth grade, I could barely hold the pen correctly in my hand, let alone make the basic vertical and horizontal strokes that I demonstrated weeks ago. Calligraphy is a beautiful medium to express creativity because there really aren’t any limits to what you can achieve. There’s always another way to write that one letter, or another way to combine two different inks to add a different element to the strokes.

In the end, I hope that my blog was educational, in the least, and maybe even inspired you to take up calligraphy yourself.