Hello again, and welcome to episode two of season two! Last week’s post mainly served as an introduction/refresher on what my blog is about. To add a new aspect to my blog this semester, I want to not only work on things that come to my mind, but also things that are recommended to me by my readers. So this is going to be my first post that does just that!

On last week’s entry, I got a recommendation to write a piece with school spirit, commemorating Penn State. Specifically requested to be blue and white. However, I ran into a small bump in the road. I don’t have any white calligraphy pens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Yet this doesn’t mean I can’t make something of that nature. I decided to just use blue ink on white paper, writing out our mascot, “Nittany Lions”.

I forgot to practice for most of this week, so before I tried my hand at this week’s piece, I wanted to warm myself up with a few horizontal and vertical lines. It’s always important to practice the fundamentals, because the different fundamental shapes are combined with each other to make more complex shapes and eventually letters!

I started off with normal vertical strokes, no flairs at the top or bottom, just a down motion with the pen at a diagonal angle.

Then I did the same with horizontal strokes.

Afterwards, I practiced a few with curved and edged flairs on the top and bottom and the sides, and eventually felt good enough to finally start.

So, I flipped to a new page and began my writing. I generally write my capital “N” the way it’s shown on screen now, with the diagonal line between the two vertical ones. But I decides to try something new this time around. I used a more lowercase looking style, with a little horseshoe swoop for the second half of the letter. Then came the “i” and the two lowercase “t”s, which use the same exact pen strokes for the entire shape. The final three letters to finish up “Nittany” were “a”, “n”, and “y”, and those three also have very similar pen strokes to form, so it ended up working really well for me in terms of convenience. I didn’t have to switch between different shapes all too much.

To start the second part, “Lions”, I did what I normally do for a capital “L”, a normal vertical stroke with a wavy horizontal stroke to make the bottom portion of the letter. The “i” and the “n” are the same as they were in “Nittany”, and the “o” was fairly similar to the “a”, with a typical box letter structure. The “s” was definitely my favorite to write because it’s made up of six different pen movements, which makes it that much more satisfying when I can pull it off and make it look cohesive with the rest of the piece.

To make it a little more fun to look at, I used the 2mm end of my blue pen to make a fair amount of swooping flourishes between and around the words. In the end, this is what I ended up with!:

I hope this week’s blog was entertaining enough, and if you have any suggestions, feel free to put them in a comment below!