Flourished Modern Calligraphy Manuscript Layout

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Happy Friday! This week’s video is about creating long calligraphy compositions, specifically, how to lay them out and flourish inside the negative space. You can watch my entire process here, from sketch to pointed calligraphy pen. While I haven’t cut out any steps, I did speed it up, because the real layout took me over an hour!

This is a relaxing, quiet video with simple instructions. I have lots of video tutorials with in-depth, spoken instructions, so check those out if you’re looking for more comprehensive tutorials!

The text I’m calligraphing in the video is a beautiful excerpt from “On the Nature of Things” by Lucretius (c. 55 B.C.E.). It’s from the translation by William Ellery Leonard.