tutorial | Arabic Calligraphy

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.

The Drop, a popular shape

The famous logo of “Al-Jazeera” is calligraphic design. In Arabic, “al-Jazeera” means “the island” as a reference to the peninsula shape of Qatar. The logo was selected by Hamad bin Khalifa, the emir of Qatar, as the winning entry in a design competition. The Al Jazeera logo was not designed by a professional graphic designer or marketing firm. It was designed by a calligrapher.

The logo represents the shape of a drop of water which is considered in the Islamic world as the most precious invention of God after humanity. In Persian dictionary, the first word is “ab” which mean water and “abadan” for “civilized”. Water is a vital element, the symbol of life.

For calligraphers, the drop shape is also a gift. In figurative calligraphy, it is important to find a natural match between the shape of letters and the lines of the figure. Most words in Arabic start with the particle “Al” (ال) which corresponds grammatically to the definite article. It literally translate as “the”. For example, kitaab (كتاب) means book and al kitaab (الكتاب) means “the book”.

As you can notice, these 2 letters are vertical and are on the right side as Arabic language writes from right to left. The right side of the shape of a water drop is delimited by a semi-vertical line which can easily be outlined by a Alif and a Lam.

The rest of the word can fill the drop’s shape with a certain freedom. In the Arabic calligraphy, the ending is relatively free which makes it easy to close the shape. The graphical options for the middle of the word which will fill the inner part of the drop are numerous.

Take away

Drop shape is very popular in Arabic or Islamic culture because of the high value of Water

drop shape is very popular among calligrapher because of its simple shape that matches geometrically a lot of words.