I’m sure you’ve had times in your calligraphy journey where you wish you could magically draw lines for an art piece or erase a word because you misspelled it…(Trust me, I’ve been there :P)
That’s exactly why I thought of writing to you about these life-saving tools that every calligrapher must have.
1. Making lines for an art piece: I get so many questions about how I create my guides for a final piece, here are two tools that I mainly use.
Light Pad
A light pad is basically a thin box or tablet with a translucent surface that is lit from inside. You simply place a sheet of paper on it that has guidelines and then place another sheet
of paper on top of that. When you turn on the light, it allows you to see the image on the paper beneath. A few nice brands are HUION, Artograph.
A laser level shoots a red laser line across the page which you can then use as a baseline.
My laser liner is from a brand called Black and Decker.
2. Fixing a mistake: We’ve all been in a moment where a tiny spelling error leads us to redo the entire piece...here are a few hacks that I hope can save you next time.
Xacto Knife - You can use the Xacto knife to pick out tiny ink splatters and small portions of ink from your paper. It essentially removes the first layer of paper fibers on which you’ve written. You want to be extremely careful while doing this so as to not tear into the paper.
Sand eraser: YES! An eraser that rubs off ink, Tombow makes these amazing erasers that come in handy when you’ve made a spelling error in a big piece and don’t want to rewrite everything. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, you may not be able to erase an entire line
but a stroke or a few letters would work out just fine.
3. Writing on non-calligraphy-friendly paper: I'm sure you've experienced bleeding of ink while writing on porous surfaces. Here's what I use to deal with this problem.
Prep Powder: Meet your new secret weapon against unruly writing surfaces - rubbing just a little bit of prep powder before you write on non-calligraphy friendly paper like handmade sheets will help reduce the bleeding to a great extent.
Hope you found this helpful and we'd love to know about your secret hacks if you have any!
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