Ruling the Page for Capital Letter Calligraphy

Joanne Wasserman: Hello! I am Joanne Wasserman and my studio is Wasserman Design and today we are learning Chancery Cursive script. We have finished all the small letters, we are already writing sentences with them, but the capital letters will allow us to write sentences in good English grammar form. So, the first thing to learn the capital letters is to rule our lines four of the capital letters. The only difference between the lines for the small letters and the capital letters is just one extra line. So, you will find this really familiar from what we did at the beginning of this lesson.

First we take our pen because we are going to make the letters, the width of ours proportional to the width of our pen. So I have taped my paper down, I have my T-square and I am going to make the five marks for my small letters, as I did before by just making little blocks with my pen touching one edge to another. So that is five and so that is enough with the pen and then I will count from the top, one, two squares and two and a half and I will just make a little mark and then just as I did before I will take a scrap piece of paper and just mark down the top of that first of the five squares and the middle mark I just made for the two and a half distance and then at the end a five.

Then I will move up and I moved up my paper and I now, I do not need that middle mark any more, I just need to hit the far, the bottom so this space is five pen and I am going to put a little X on my scrap paper to mark that space as five pen-width wide and then I am going to make one more mark and it also will be five pen-width wide. I do not need to mark that middle two and a half distance anymore, I did it once. So now I have instead of four marks, I have five, one, two, three, four, five. So, alright, from here we have already got the middle mark with a two and a half distance, I want to go down and start and I want to make my next mark where I have that X on my scrap paper, I am going to put the X right on the paper and then I am going to mark that last line and just leave it blank.

Then I just move my whole scrap piece down to that first mark and now I am going to mark that two and a half distance. Then pick up five, then here where my X is I am going to mark that line and put an X to remind myself that that is where I am writing my small letters. Then make that next line and go down and keep going down the page marking. So I am done with the paper, I have got my mark and I will take my T-square and with my pencil, I would just rule this lines all the way down and they are all parallels to one another. With the T-square lining up against the edge of the table, it goes very quickly.

There and we have now one, two, three, four, five, six lines in which we can write all the letters of the capital alphabet which are called Majuscule. It is a Latin term for the large letters.