Calligraphy Tips: How to Connect Strokes and Letters

Let’s say you have already started to learn brush lettering or calligraphy of any kind. As a beginner, you start by focusing on drills and basic strokes, then graduate to letters from simplest to most challenging. (To read my blog post about how to study the alphabet, click HERE).

Using my practice guide worksheets and tracing over those letters again and again helps you build muscle memory, which is critical before moving on to the next level of calligraphy, which is writing words.

To help you understand how to write words and figure out the spacing of the strokes and letters, I designed the Connections tracing guides. These sets of worksheets have a two tone grey scale breakdown of words into separate strokes so that you can easily see where to lift and start while you are writing.

There are two sets of Connections for both large and small brush pens. Set 1 has “Calendar Words” like days of week, months of the years, colours, time of day and so on. Set 2 has Holiday Greetings like ‘Happy Birthday’, ‘Farewell,’ ‘Hello’ and ‘Merry Christmas’. Click HERE to see Connections in my Shop for Large brush pens and click HERE to see Connections for Small brush pens.

One good way to practice your spacing of strokes and letters is to simply write two letters side by side across your page, repeating them line after line.  Start with two of the easiest letters, the lowercase ‘i’ and the lowercase ‘t.’ Then move onto other letter combinations.

After you gain some control about spacing these letters apart, do the same exercise, but this time, draw the two letters closer together to connect them. Again, begin with the letters i-t and then move on to more challenging letters with more curves.

To see these worksheets in action, here is my YouTube video tutorial that demonstrates how to connect strokes to form letters and words. Enjoy!