I’ve been dabbling with modern calligraphy since last year. I’ve watched some Youtube videos, went through a couple of online lessons and practised occasionally but I’ve never attended a proper calligraphy class yet. It wasn’t until this year that modern calligraphy and handwritten artworks have become wildly popular and calligraphy classes made more accessible.

I’ve been following several calligraphers on Instagram, of which, a few of them are local and holds calligraphy workshops here. But most workshops are catered for a small group size so I only managed to register myself for a workshop by The Letter J Supply after several attempts.

So you can imagine how excited I was on that Saturday morning! Although, I must admit, my excitement was slightly doused  because I was worried about the sick little one at home 🙁

The calligraphy workshop was held at the beautiful HomesToLife at I12 Katong. The glorious sunlight steaming in through the full-height windows, soft tunes of bossa nova and homely looking furnishings all around makes it such a wonderful place to just sit down and write.

This is the starter kit that we used at the workshop and get to bring home after that. It consists of an oblique pen holder, a Nikko G nib, a pot of ink and practice sheets of basic strokes, miniscules and capitals. Very basic, but just what we need to start writing 🙂

I have been using the straight pen holder as I couldn’t find the oblique one at Artfriend previously, but using the oblique pen holder is SO MUCH BETTER because a straight pen holder is actually more suitable for a leftie.

Joanne started the session talking about how she went into calligraphy and we had a round of self-introduction, sharing about what motivated us to come for this workshop.

She then taught us the basics of how to handle the nib and pen holder and the angle at which the pen should be held. She also explained how the ink should be filled and how it is held and released by the nib. Understanding all these will help a beginner learn to better control the pressure and strokes when writing.

She showed us how the basic strokes are done and we went back to our seats to practise and she walked around to correct us individually and gave us pointers. We went on to practise the miniscules and capitals after her respective demo.

At the end of the session, we tried writing our own names to practise joining the different alphabets together. My name is too short for a anything fancy so I wrote daprayer instead 🙂

It was an informative session learning about the basics of modern calligraphy, some of which I already know, but there were still a lot of new takeaways such as the importance of using the right tools and supplies 🙂

It is not the first time I put ink on paper so the session was rather therapeutic for me, being at a beautiful place with a great and soothing environment, just practising my writing.

I really like the size of the class. There were only 12 of us so Joanne was able to go around and provide comments and guidance on our writings individually. But I was hoping that she could show us how we can vary our styles from the standard. I understand that we may not have time for that at the workshop because the 3 hours are just not enough for all the hands-on practise!

I still have a lot to work on but I’m waiting for my layout paper to arrive before I resume my practising. I can’t wait!!

The workshop fee is $120 and is organised by HomesToLife. You can follow their facebook page for updates on the workshops. The Letter J Supply also conducts workshops at other locations and you can get updates on that via her instagram account. I would say follow her on instagram because it’s such a visual feast!!

Till the next workshop~!