I like to start every conversation about penmanship tools with a disclaimer: your strategy for practice is the most important factor in learning to improve your signature, your overall handwriting, or in mastering the foundations of penmanship as an art. Tools are a secondary consideration, and you don’t need anything expensive or complicated.
That said, tools can be a fun and helpful luxury – especially if you’re trying to correct stubborn grip issues, poor posture, or take your writing to the next level. Below are four of my personal favorites.
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The squishiest-grip pen of all time: Uni-Ball 207 Premier Retractable Gel Pen
An ergonomic foot rest: Mind Reader Adjustable Height Ergonomic Foot Rest
If you tend to write with poor setup or posture (think: slumped shoulders, heavily resting on forearms, bent low over the paper) consider correcting the problem from the ground up. When you practice penmanship of any kind, your feet should rest flat on the floor, your back should be straight, and you should learn toward the table by pivoting at the hips. When your feet are resting flat on the ground, they act as an additional support for your bodyweight, taking pressure off of your core and allowing you to maintain correct posture for longer periods without fatigue. By contrast, if you tend to practice writing from a chair where your feet don’t easily reach the ground, your body will tend to tilt forward, more stress will be put on your core to keep you upright, and you will likely compensate by leaning heavily on your arms. This can be a major issue, because it restricts your freedom of movement when you’re writing and encourages you to press down hard on the paper, creating the opposite of the smooth, fluid motion you want. An ergonomic foot rest is an easy solution to this problem. The Mind Reader foot rest linked above is cheap, effective, and readily available – but anything that gets your feet flat and in the correct position will help.
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A slanted writing desk that doubles as a dry-erase board: Visual Edge Slant Board
This tool is a high-impact multi-tasker that offers a lot of benefits:
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Tracing paper: Staedtler Mars Vellum Paper
Tracing exercises are one of the most valuable and underused penmanship practice techniques. If done mindfully, they can help you to ingrain correct movements and letterforms into your muscle memory. The exercises in my book, Create a Signature You Love, leverage tracing exercises as a low-risk starting point and for warmup drills. I personally tested over 50 different types of tracing paper, translucent vellum, and drafting paper before deciding which type to include with my workbook. The Staedtler Mars Vellum was my standout favorite. It plays well with almost any pen and ink, has an ideal degree of transparency, and is smooth and durable. It typically costs between $15-$20 for a 50-sheet pack. Other, cheaper options exist, but be aware that most tracing papers come with a waxy coating that doesn’t absorb ink well, and that changes the feel of the pen-to-paper contact. Your best bet is to look for an artist’s tracing paper or architect’s drafting vellum. Darice Studio 71 Tracing Pads are a cheaper, acceptable alternative.
Do you have a favorite penmanship tool or technique? Share with us in the comments!
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Happy practicing.
]]>The internet has democratized education to an unprecedented degree, and self-study programs – whether in the form of video lessons, interactive online courses, or good-old-fashioned books – are wildly popular.
It would be almost impossible to overstate my enthusiasm for self-study. I typically listen to at least two audiobooks per month, I dedicate several hours per week to hone my creative skills on CreativeLive, and I can hardly pass by the Arts/Crafts books in art stores or hobby shops without trying to take a least one home. I love the flexibility and low-stakes of learning on my own, with no one there to rush me or judge me – except, of course, myself.
For all the advantages of self-study, there are some very real challenges that we very rarely discuss. Practicing alone might feel less risky, but what happens when it comes time you evaluate and critique your own work?
To grow your skills, you have to engage in purposeful practice. You have to have a strategy. And that strategy always involves evaluation of your progress and highly specific goal-setting.
Unfortunately, objective self-reflection is not the strong suit of human nature. We tend to make broad value statements about our work and about ourselves. We use words like “good,” “bad,” “pretty,” or “ugly.” As I wrote in Create a Signature You Love, “Statements like these aren’t useful to us because they give us almost no actionable information, and the negative ones do us an additional disservice by putting a damper on our emotional state and eroding our motivation.”
There are three main strategies I recommend for getting around this classically human, but entirely unhelpful habit:
Let’s look at an example.
Here is a study I did in oil on canvas, using Charlie Bowater’s “The Old Astronomer” as a prompt.
It’s all too easy for me to look at these two images side-by-side and begin disparaging mine. Clearly, one is better than the other. But “better” and “worse” aren’t useful to me unless I get more specific.
So I’ll choose to ask myself a better question: how is mine different from the prompt? How is it similar?
First off, I took artistic license in a few areas to better fit my goals and resources.
All that being said, how is my image similar to my chosen prompt, or to how I wanted it to be?
How is my image different from the prompt, or from how I wanted it to be?
We can stop here. There are a hundred more ways I could dissect and compare my image to Bowater’s, but that isn’t necessary. Charlie Bowater is a professional artist, and I am a relatively new, hobbyist painter. I have recognized and thought critically about a couple of areas where I did well, and I have identified two areas I want to improve on: creating textures and creating transitions.
When you’re new to something, it isn’t useful to get hyper focused on every fault. It’s best to set one to three specific, measurable goals and work toward them with intention during your next practice sessions.
Share with us in the comments:
I have a terrible habit, especially when committing words to paper, of trying to say exactly what I mean.
Despite knowing that arguments are more persuasive when made in a direct, concise manner, I persist in trying to construct air-tight arguments that leave nothing to the reader’s interpretation.
This habit was born from a deep concern about being misunderstood.
Each time I edit my work – striving to take the advice of writers I admire to delete, tighten, and simplify – I furtively add words and lengthen paragraphs, insisting to myself that the additions are required for clarity.
But really, I’m just railing against the critic in my head. I’m trying to address every argument that could be made against each one of my statements. I’m working to anticipate how a friend or family member might misunderstand me, how the internet fact-police might pick apart my words, how anyone, for any reason, might disagree with me.
I sit writing, pouring heart and mind and soul into weaving my knowledge, experience, and perspective into work that I will offer up to others. All the while, that voice in my head – that amalgam of real and imagined critics and internet trolls – talks to me, and I listen. And out of fear, I often respond.
Why do I write for this person?
Hasn’t every writer, every artist who has ever moved me been a person with the courage to have a point of view – a perspective which will almost certainly provoke skeptics and critics?
Why do I seek to persuade by disproving the alternatives to my assertions – trying to force the reader to stay with me by cutting off her exits rather than by convincing her to stay?
The true genius of art is to bring another person with you to the edge of your question, and to hint at your answer. It’s for her to grasp with her own sensations and her own words. It’s up to her to seek to understand, or to seek to argue.
Perhaps we can only experience real connection when we are willing to risk being misunderstood.
Many times, this leads us to give up before we even really begin. (Read more about this in another post "Art Shame and Learning to Learn," from the preface of the Create a Signature You Love practice guide and workbook.)
The solution is to train yourself to emphasize – and enjoy – process over outcome when you’re learning.
But if you’ve always been hard on yourself, where do you begin? Unfortunately, it takes more than an intellectual acceptance that harsh self-criticism isn’t useful (although that’s a start!).
Happily, there are some really fun ways to interrupt and rewire negative thought patterns.
One of my favorites for short-circuiting your inner critic during writing practice is to write by candlelight. Here’s how to do it effectively:
“A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism…. With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.” Alfred Binet, Inventor of the IQ Test
“People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. You want something, go get it. Period.” Christopher Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness
I often reflect upon the good old days, when my artistic ability was on par with that of my peers – when I could draw expressively and unselfconsciously, taking risks with color and composition, and no subject matter was “too ambitious” for my skill level. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case since kindergarten.
Sometime around first or second grade, things started to change. I remember completing a drawing during art class, holding my work up in front of my face to admire it, my consciousness slowly returning from the place of focus and joy that it had inhabited while I was creating.
I felt good.
Then, looking to my right to see what my best friend had drawn, I experienced a moment of pure shock and fear. At the time, I had no knowledge of perspective, lines, values, or any of the other tools artists use to produce aesthetically pleasing work – but in that moment, I knew one thing with a certainty simpler than breathing: hers was good, and mine was bad. All I could think was, “What happened? How did she do that? What did I miss?”
Shortly thereafter, I compared some handwritten work with that of another friend, and experienced a similar cocktail of emotions which foreshadowed the handwriting, signature, and general art-shame I would often feel in the years to come. Her writing was tidy, smooth, consistent; she used the space on the page intelligently. Mine, in plain contrast, was almost comically large, awkwardly spaced, and disorganized. I had no concept of how much space on the page a sentence would occupy until after I finished writing it, I gripped my writing utensils as though they might unexpectedly break free and attack me, and I pressed down so hard on the paper I could probably have carved letters into stone without additional effort. But I didn’t perceive any of these nuances. I sat there, thinking in the simple terms of “good” and “bad,” utterly dumbfounded as to how this had happened.
It was so jarring. I truly loved to learn, I was never afraid to work hard, and there were many other areas in which I seemed to excel. My verbal and writing abilities, for example, were often the focus of the praise I received from family and teachers. My parents told, and retold, stories about how many words I could say at nine months old, and how I could speak in full sentences at one year. They commented "it was almost scary," and that my small size coupled with my large vocabulary "freaked some people out." They reminded me that, at three or four years old, after being given a book by my grandmother, I had sanguinely, yet matter-of-factly set about the task of teaching myself to read. Naïve and full of hope about my future, I often felt a swell of pride upon hearing these stories. They made me believe I was special and gifted, and I filed them away carefully, as testaments to my intelligence and innate talents.
And yet, the artistic competence of my friends seemed to have developed naturally, while mine had remained stagnant. How did artistic skill pass me by without me even noticing? I didn’t know the answer with the clarity of words – but I felt it. I felt a deficiency, a failure, inside of me. If my verbal ability, which often felt effortless, made me seem “gifted” in the eyes of others, what did these artistic failures make me?
World-renowned psychologist Carol Dweck has spent years studying how children cope with failure. This research led her to make a groundbreaking contribution to her field when she described the two broad belief systems that people have about intelligence and ability. She calls these belief systems the “fixed mindset” and the “growth mindset.”
A person with a fixed mindset views learning (either in general or in relation to specific tasks) as being tied to innate and immutable ability. Results in learning are seen as a function of raw talent; i.e. a fixed mindset child with a poor grade in math class might say “I’m not good at math” or even, tragically, “I’m not smart enough.” If the same child experiences success in writing or sports, he might say “I’m really creative” or “I’ve always been athletic.” Whether the child is experiencing success or failure, ability is described as a feature of who the child is, and the outcome is explained as an inevitable expression of that feature. The emphasis in this mindset is on fixed, inborn human characteristics or capacities.
By contrast, a person with a growth mindset essentially believes that intelligence and talent can be developed. Learning, therefore, is understood as a long-term process where results are primarily a function of effort expended, time spent, quality of instruction or materials, etc. A child with a growth mindset, experiencing the same setbacks and achievements from the examples above, might respond to them by saying “I need to study harder for math class,” and “I’m getting good at writing/sports because I have a great teacher/coach and I practice all the time.” The emphasis is on behaviors.
Dweck has found that these mindsets are instrumental factors in whether people succeed in reaching their potential, and in whether they have a positive relationship to learning. While the growth mindset has been linked to enjoyment of learning, resilience in the face of setbacks, and mastery, the fixed mindset has been linked to decreased self-confidence, brittle resolve, and learned helplessness.
Why?
In the face of failure, people with the fixed mindset tend to feel not only that they have failed in this instance, but that they are failures. Even in success, “fixed mindsetters” link their self-worth to their results. As Dweck puts it in her important book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone… creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you only have a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character, well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.” But since all real learning and growth inevitably require mistakes, losses, and failures along the way, people with the fixed mindset often end up trapped inside small comfort zones, racked with anxiety and doubt, afraid that a mistake will dispel their “talented” or “smart” image. Ultimately, they are often unable to stay the course to mastery.
But, back in my elementary school classes, impressed by the work of my friends and bewildered by its contrast with mine, I didn’t know any of that.
My curiosity, enthusiasm, and considerable grit notwithstanding, I concluded, “I am not an artistic person.” This made sense to me. It fit. Some people were born with this gift, and some weren’t. That neatly explained why the artwork and handwriting of some kids continued to improve, while that of others (like myself) did not. I had other strengths, but I wasn’t built to produce beautiful pictures or letters. I leaned into a fixed mindset, effectively banning myself from an entire area of interest because of my perceived deficiency and hanging more importance than ever on my “natural gifts,” with which I sought to compensate.
From then on, I marveled at artists as though they were magicians with access to some secret power that was off limits to me, I drooled over the confident, fluid strokes of my friends’ signatures and envied the elusive inner spirit that I thought made them possible. I secretly wished, truly, deeply, and often, that I could have that talent. But it could not be learned. You were born either right-brained or left-brained, visual or logical, creative or analytical – but, except in exceedingly rare cases, you could not be both.
It was a long time before I stopped believing this.
The truth is, my literary success can be explained primarily by the fact that I spent enormous chunks of my free time reading and writing – in other words, analyzing examples of quality writing and practicing. By contrast, I rarely spent time drawing, had few examples of the process of creating visual art, and effectively quit trying to improve my handwriting and signature pretty early on.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that I all but lost my motivation to improve my signature after I had concluded that I wasn’t the kind of person who could have good handwriting. Still, I briefly felt the desire to shrink away and hide, as well as the trademark hot flash followed by cold sweat that accompanies all my episodes of shame, each time I signed my name on an important document - my passport, my driver’s license, my first (and second, and third…) job offer acceptance letter.
In the grand scheme of life, it may seem a small thing, but each time I signed my name, it felt like I was revealing my incredible lack of artistic endowment. I simply couldn’t reconcile with the fact that I could possibly perform so poorly at something I had been doing for so many years. It felt like something I should be able to do. Letting another person see my messy signature, which hadn’t improved an ounce since childhood, felt like admitting to them that I couldn’t spell my own name.
Thankfully, that wasn’t all I felt. Some stubborn, yet optimistic, part of me refused to fully accept that there was something I was incapable of doing as well as I wanted to. Deep down, I sensed that this idea that our capacities are predetermined and finite did not represent the true face of the world.
In the last several years, this possibility has become a fascination and a passion to me. I’ve invested countless hours researching and experimenting with learning how to learn better. What I’ve found, both in theory and in practice, is that the gifts we are born with – or without – need have little bearing on our futures. You can develop your intelligence, your creativity, and your mindset.
Consider the following study, cited by Dweck in Mindset, “Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher, studied 120 outstanding achievers. They were concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, world-class tennis players, and mathematicians. Most were not that remarkable as children and didn’t show clear talent before their training began in earnest…. Bloom concludes, ‘After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.’ He’s not counting the two to three percent of children who have severe learning impairments, and he’s not counting the top one to two percent of children at the other extreme…. He is counting everybody else.”
Most skills are acquired when a person focuses on and practices with the right materials, consistently, over time. Math is a skill. Art is a skill. Signatures are a skill. In this book, I will show you which materials to focus on, teach you how to stay consistent, and help you create a signature you love in the shortest time possible.
If I can do it, you can do it.
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