Pen Angle for Italic Hand Calligraphy

By Mary W. Hart
Mary W. Hart

Mary W. Hart has been a calligrapher for over 35 years, since she first learned it as a student of Arnold Bank at Carnegie Mellon University, in the course of my studies for a Graphic Design BA. Although her background is in traditional lettering styles and formal design projects, her current work focuses on the use of writing as a textural element in her paintings. Mary W. Hart's work ranges from encaustic paintings and three dimensional forms to transcription of lettering on material as diverse as bark, chiffon, rice tissue and paper. The common element in her work is the use of letter forms, both as writing and abstract calligraphic marks. She teach classes in Calligraphy, Graphic Design, Visual Dynamics and Color at Middlesex Community College, The Museum School in Boston, and Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Use a forward slant for italic letters in calligraphy. Learn how much your should slant your pen when writing italic hand calligraphy in this free calligraphy lesson from a calligraphy instructor.

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Video transcription

Now we're going to look at the slant of letters. Now we talk about slant in a lot of different ways. There's the pen angle slant. There's the slant of how you hold the pen personally. But there's also the way the letters fit into the guideline space and the forward slant. We think of italic as having a forward slant, so if I write the word lift, we're going to see that the letters all slant consistently forward. Now most American writers have a forward slant built into their handwriting. I think it's a little bit about our cursive, but when we translate into writing round letters, sometimes it's hard to see where exactly the slant exists. So I wanted to show you that if I make an oval that even in the rounded letters, we're thinking of the forward slant as being the axis through that oval. And we're thinking of creating a matching forward slant in all of the letters, so italic is characterized by the narrow shape of the letter forms, like we've got an oval, and the forward slant of the letters.