If you’re ready to get really fancy, here’s one more phrase to practice. When I wrote the phrase, “good times,” I used a forward underline flourish on the “g,” and a backward one on the “m.” To make the phrase look cohesive, the first flourish also doubles as the crossbar of the “t” in “times.” Try writing this phrase a few times it’s a great one for practicing! Once you get comfortable with the basic idea of these underline flourishes, it’s fun to try putting them together within a phrase.
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Remember, there are no hard and fast rules for when and how to use these flourishing techniques just play around as you sketch out your phrases and see what seems to work best with the particular combination of letters you have. Here’s how the same flourish looks like at different places within a word.
While this is a beautiful finish for a word, it doesn’t have to be limited to just a final letter! You can do this flourish right in the middle of a word too! Take a look: Finally, for the word, “in,” I extended well past the beginning of the word and formed a little decorative spiral.
In the word, “won,” underlined the entire word, while in “pin,” I couldn’t because of the “p.” When I wrote, “run,” I actually brought the line all the way back up to the starting point of the “r” and connected it to make the word look like one continuous line! Since I needed to cross the “t” in “ton,” I just kept my line going and turned the underline into a crossbar. It all depends on the letters in the word and the look you want to achieve. However, just as with the forward underline, you get to determine just how far your line will extend. In the word, “fun,” I let the line travel back under the “u,” before stopping because of the downward loop of the “f.” This flourish is a nice touch at the end of a word as an elegant way to finish it off. This time, after you’ve completed the final downstroke of your letter, you’ll loop your pen up and to the right, then bring the line back down and to the left, as shown below. Some of the letters I often use for this are “n,” “m,” “r,” and “h.” You can try it with any letters you like…it’s all about what styles you like! You’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. This same technique creates an entirely different effect when you switch the direction of the loop and carry the line out to the left instead! Now, instead of underlining the letters ahead of it, this flourish doubles back and underlines what came before. Play around with several different ways and see what you like! Flourishing isn’t an exact science, it’s an art form, so it’s up to you as the designer to choose what looks best to you when you’re lettering a particular word or phrase. You’ll notice that while I continued the underline all the way to the end of the word, “good,” I cut it short in the word, “joy,” stopping under the “o” to allow for the loop of the “y.” In the word, “your,” I chose to extend the line out even further past the end of the word. Here’s a look at this flourish used within a few basic words. I tend to finish off the line with an upward curl. This works especially well with letters like “j,” “g,” and “y.”Īfter you’ve done your final downstroke of the letter, simply loop your pen up and continue the line out to the right as long as you like before picking up your pen. Here are two different directions it can take.įirst, let’s look at how this works when the flourish loops up and over to the right. You simply loop your pen up and over your existing line, then extend it out to the side. Take a look…īefore we look at how this works with specific letters, let’s look at the basic shape of the flourish itself. Today, we’re going to learn one of my favorite techniques something I like to call underline flourishing, because the flourish acts like an underline below the word you’re writing. Some flourishes stand alone as artistic embellishments, while others are actually part of the letters themselves. One of the easiest ways to take your hand lettering to the next level is by learning to flourish! There are many different ways to do it, including the various descender letter flourishes we looked at last week.