Technique | Arabic Calligraphy

Latin or Arabic?

Being born in France, the first language I learned to write was French with its Latin alphabet. My passion for Arabic calligraphy started later when I was a student.

I was attracted by the harmony and the flow of the Arabic letters and got offered the possibility to be trained by a Master. I focused initially on the Diwani style for which I received an intensive training. When I felt more comfortable with Diwani, I tried the Koufi style which is more geometric. In fact, this style is usually integrating architectural elements.

example

Full of imagination, I noticed that Arabic letters written with Koufi style were showing geometrical similarities with Latin letters.

The letter “noun” can look like an “i”

The letter “ain” can look like an “e”

The letter “waw” can look like a “g”

The letter “alif” can look like a “l”

etc.

And for the letters that are not so similar, I noticed that you could split the Arabic letters into basic elements that can be combined subtly to appear like a Latin letter.

Take away:

Arabic calligraphy has a rich panel of styles and scripts

Calligraphers with imagination can be very playful

It is possible to write a text with Latin letters and make it look like Arabic

How to make very thick lines

Calligraphy is the art of writing beautiful letters. To do this, you need to use the right tools: pen, ink and paper. In this post, I will focus on the pens that allow you to draw very thick lines.

Calligraphic pens are made to fit comfortably in your hands. This ergonomic allows you to have full control of your movement and draw very precise lines. In Latin, Persian or Arabic, one key element is the alternation of thick and thin lines. A calligraphic pen has a special shape. The bottom part in contact with the paper is wide. The ink flows from the cartridge or an area that can contain a volume of liquid ink. When the ink reaches the bottom, the structure and geometry of the pen makes the ink regularly distributed all along the width of the nib.

In regular shops, calligraphic pens have a nib up to 3mm wide. If you look for wider pens, you need to go to special shops where you may find pens up to 6mm wide. Some manufacturers propose up to 2cm. The wider the pens are, the rarer they are to find.

Imagine now that you are looking for a width of 10-15cm… Where can you find a pen that distributes in a control manner the ink across the whole width? Not easy to find and if you find one, it will be quite expensive…

When I started calligraphy, I was a student and I did not have a lot of money to invest in numerous calligraphic pens. When I spoke to my teacher about this dilemma, he asked me to buy the cheapest ink pens and he showed me how to make my own pens.

So I will show you how to build yours for a very cheap price.

Steps

buy a painter spatula
buy adhesive felt
past the felt over the spatula edge in such a way that you create a small reservoir to hold your liquid ink

job done !!!

photos

Take away

If you cannot find or afford the right tools to make beautiful modern calligraphic pieces, do not worry. You can build your own tools.

Zoomorphism in Calligraphy

Zoomorphism comes from the Greek ζωον (zōon), meaning “animal”, and μορφη (morphē), meaning “shape” or “form”. In calligraphy, it is the art of writing a text and make the lines of the letters form the shape of an animal.

This art is very popular in Arabic calligraphy and there are different methods to make it possible. Each method helps adding more realism into the materialization of the animal.

Linear – Easy to read

The first one consists in filling the space without changing the way you write. Basically, you write in lines and the shape will appear because you start and stop the line at a specific position. With this method, it is only the outline that will be visible.

Linear plus – Easy to recognize

In order to increase the subtlety of the design, you can opt for modifying the way you space the words and letters. Visually, this effect will modify the density of the ink and will make it possible to materialize shapes inside the outline. The free space can optionally be filled with ink in order to give some perspective or to add a lighting effet

Organic – The animal looks realistic.

Next step would be to extend some letters in order to follow more organically the lines of the animal. This method brings more realism and allows us to clearly distinguish legs, wings, head, hairs from the body. In order to help building some realism, words are not necessarily following horizontal lines. Lines can be curved in order to naturally follow some key elements defining the animal. The text becomes more difficult to read

Realist – The animal is “alive”

Next step is to forget about the lines and the order of the words and to focus on the key lines of the drawings. In this case, each word is positioned following a geometrical logic rather than the meaning of the sentence. The word is following perfectly the main lines of the animal. You can also define zones according to lighting effect or texture contrast in order to increase the realism of the calligraphy. With this method, it is also possible to give the animal an expression or the feeling of a movement.

How to create a figurative design

I will describe in this post the different methods that I use to create figurative designs.

A figurative design in calligraphy is a design that is made with letters and represents a recognizable figure like an animal, a face, an object or any other element such as a moon, a star or a drop.

Method 1: Simple filling

This method has been used in much traditional calligraphy and consists in writing words and sentences inside a single zone. In such creation, you can still feel that most of the focus is in writing beautiful letters that perfectly fits with the traditional rules.

Method 2: the “Andy Warhol’s” approach

This method is used in modern calligraphy in order to give more emphasis to the figure that is represented. The best way to explain this technique is to make an analogy with Andy Warhol’s work.

If you look at the portraits he made, he usually picks up 3 or 4 colors to represent a character. Each color is covering a zone. You can apply those same principle to calligraphy.

How does it work?

In calligraphy, you can select different size of pens and use different fonts in order to define a texture. The texture can be very compact or airy. By having a palette of texture, you can also define zones in a figure and apply a different texture for each zone.

This way, you will create a figure only with letters. This technique is often used for figuration in modern calligraphy.

Method 3: the “matching” approach

This method is the one that provides the most organic calligraphies, where the realism is maximized through an effort to have the letter and the figure matching. This possibility comes from the structures of letters which have both a free and a constrained shape. If you look at letters from a pure geometrical point of view, you will realize that some are rather vertical, others horizontal, circular or more compact. At the level of a word or a sentence, the combination of those directions allows a lot of flexibility when you start composing shapes.

Let’s take the example of a Lion. The lines shaping the Lion have a numerous type of directions – a combination of vertical, horizontal, circular and oval lines. Each element of line can find a correspondence with the component of a letter.

The work of the calligrapher is to find the good match. With experience, you can find matches on 99% of the figure. The idea is then to fit it. Some words and shapes are easily compatible. Others are more complex.