Calligraphy and Squirts with Heidi

How to use LSG Squirts as your calligraphy medium

Hi everyone, Heidi here, today I would like to show you that you can not only use Lindy’s Stamp Gang products to paint with or create mixed media projects with but that you can also use them in your calligraphy projects!

What do you need?

If you have never used a calligraphy pen before or have never really practiced with one than I surely recommend doing that first.

What do you need to get started:

– Practise paper, lots of it, I prefer grid paper with 5 mm x 5 mm squares. This way you know your characters are all the same height and if the characters are straight and this paper is cheap;

– A calligraphy pen: they come in lots of different sizes and shapes, with or without ink cartridges, cheap and expensive and so on. For today’s project, I used loose calligraphy nibs (no ink cartridge pen). I tried out the different nibs that I have and for my final project used the 2 mm nib as well as a pointed fine tip;

– I used a brush to apply the ink to the nib;

– A quote;

– A palette to hold your inks that you can dip your brush into.

– Your inks: for today’s project I used three colors of Lindy’s Stamp Gang Squirts as my inks, pure from the bottle, not mixed with water.

– A sheet of regular printer paper that you cut to the size of your final project, here you create a draft of your quote, then you also know how large your final characters will be (my final project is 26,5 cm x 19,5 cm);

– Paper for your final project: I choose Strathmore Bristol Smooth Surface, you can use whatever smooth paper you have;

– A ruler, graphite pencil and an eraser.

Practise

Even if you have experience with calligraphy you maybe have never used Lindy’s Stamp Gang Squirts with your calligraphy pens. Try out the different colors and how they respond, how often do you need to reload the ink with the brush to the pen and such things more.

After trying out different colors I settled on the red LSG Squirt (Oh Canada Crimson) for the words written with the pointed fine nib and LSG Squirts in Emerald Eh?! and Loonie Toonie Teal for the rest. I also practiced letting the green squirt run into the teal squirt while writing a text. I love this result!

I also found out that it was really important to dry each line of text before starting writing the next line because the Squirts don’t dry fast enough on their own to not smudge the ink with your hand.

Create the draft

Then I created the draft with a graphite pencil and a fine liner pen so that I knew which words would be what letter type and how large the characters would be on the size sheet that I wanted my final project to be on.

Final project

Now that I know what my project will look like in the sense of what quote to use, what letter type and how large the characters will be I used a ruler, a graphite pencil and a light hand to draw the lines on the final paper (Strathmore Bristol Smooth surface in my case). I also draw in the text for the red color because that is not my usual calligraphy style and I felt uncertain how it would look.

Of course, you can also freehand, write without placing the lines first, I do that often, but I wanted today’s project to look really nice and neat.

Go for it!

After all this practicing and preparing I finally created my project. Don’t add too much ink at once to the nib reservoir but reload regularly. I started with the green color and after that only added the teal color to the nib reservoir, this creates a gradual shift in color. I did the say with the third line of text.

I dried each line of text with my heat tool before going to the next one. To create a more aged and authentic look I also created splatters by brushing the nib over the hairs from the brush. Also dry these before moving on.

When done I added the red color with the fine nib pen going over the text that I already penciled in.

You can erase the lines that you used for writing but I left them.

And to finish my project I distressed the edges of my paper using a scissor.