This is a rather long - but you will just have to put up with me because it is something that warmed my heart on so many levels.
I've mentioned The Flourish Forum, a forum that I belong to for people who are interested in calligraphy (mostly) and penmanship (sometimes). Anyone is welcome to join. There are lots of people who find the forum when they are new to calligraphy. Some of them (very few) share their progress. There are not very many old-timers on the forum - so I try to check in every day - and share information that's piled up over my decades of research, experimenting, and sharing.
Whenever penmanship comes up on the forum - I'm all over it. In Oct 2020 - Lyric brought up penmanship and her desire to improve her everyday penmanship. I responded to her directly and offered to work with her, through email. I was thrilled with the progress she made. I shared some of what we covered in blog posts which you may find by searching. I have not heard from her in a while, but I was very impressed with how much her penmanship improved. She is definitely dovetailing calligraphy with penmanship - looking for something that is drop-dead-gorgeous - but also not painfully slow.
Back in February, ChuckS posted to the forum - wondering if there were any tips for people who had hit a plateau after working on the Consistent Cursive lessons. Lyric had gone through the CC lessons and I had reviewed them. The originator of the system (David) who posted the lessons (on YouTube) has put in a lot of time - and in theory - the lessons should be easy to follow and provide very good results.
IMHO, the part that David does not address - is how to un-learn bad habits. I have a different theory on how to correct bad penmanship. It involves streamlining the letters to the bare minimum (eliminating loops) and using the natural slant that each person already has.
ChuckS seemed like a perfect guinea pig for my approach. If I can work with people in person, I can always get them to make progress pretty easily. With ChuckS, I needed to figure out how to provide all the lessons through email. We had to work through a few different approaches - but we finally hit on something that IMHO is working.
In his off-time, he coaches weight lifters - so I found ways to dovetail penmanship *moves* to things that people do in weightlifting. Art and sports are kindred spirits.
Here is the page that he sent me at the very beginning:
He actually makes a lot of the letters clearly and there is adequate space between them. His slant is fairly consistent - and we could have gone with his natural slant - but ChuckS liked the look of no-slant and I thought that would be a good starting point.
We took all the loops away - and corrected the element that was in most need: the lack of *air* within the letters. A lot of them are very cramped, squished, pinched. At the same time - we introduced the concept of honoring the space between the letters as much as the space enclosed by letters. This is a basic building block in sooooo many disciplines. But - it can be challenging for beginners to see the importance of both kinds of *space.*
Lucky for me - ChuckS is a big fan of discipline - and he really stuck with it. There were a couple times I was a little nervous/worried that he would just give up. But - he stuck with it -- and I am thrilled to share his new and improved penmanship.
If you enlarge the image, you can see that it is not perfect. There are a few shaky spots and a few inconsistencies in spacing -- but overall - it has some style -- and the frosting on the cake --
some random person, just walking by, was struck by the loveliness - and stopped to discuss the penmanship.
Hopefully you read the whole thing so that you can imagine how excited I was about the recognition from a stranger --- getting unsolicited recognition for one's penmanship is equivalent to any kind of actual award or honor.
So, let's circle back to the part where I mentioned that ChuckS coaches weightlifters. It's possible that ChuckS is disciplined in more than just penmanship. He might be one of those people who is devoted to keeping himself in shape - and maybe the person in the coffee shop was just using the penmanship as an excuse to get acquainted and she was really just mesmerized by his physique.
The coffee was nice and strong this morning -- so, I'd actually like to head off with a fun story about the two of them hitting it off and living happily ever after. And if you are pooh-poohing the idea of a penmanship-based romance - I assure you it is not that far fetched. I have three other stories about couples who met through penmanship. Perhaps they will show up in future posts.
Thanks for indulging me in this looooong story. If you want to improve your penmanship - let me know. I could re-post the lessons I sent to ChuckS.
Hopefully he will keep practicing and as the shapes get stuck in his muscle memory - he should be able to speed up - and eventually - he can add some loops in.
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Here is an envelope - a teaser for what is popping tomorrow.
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