Cursive Vs. Calligraphy -What's the difference?

A big question when it comes to calligraphy is “What is the difference between cursive and calligraphy?”

Well, in short, calligraphy is the art of writing while cursive is a quick, efficient way to write. But I am going to discuss a few things to give you a look into how they are different.

Cursive was created many moons ago to improve the efficiency of writing. The goal is to write the whole word without lifting your pen or pencil up unless you have to. Your handwriting may be cursive or a mixture of print with cursive and you may feel it looks sloppy, therefore, you could never do calligraphy.

Well that’s false! I have sloppy handwriting too!

Calligraphy should be looked at as an art form and you learn different strokes that form letters. Between strokes you also lift your pen, unlike curse, so it will give you much better control of the thick and thin lines in your strokes.

You also use different tools! When it comes to cursive you can use whatever writing utensil you have lying around.

You can use pretty much anything to learn basic hand lettering too but if you want the calligraphy look with the thin and thick lines you will want to use a brush pen or a pen holder with a nib.

In this picture below is a Tombow dual brush pen. The dual brush pen has a normal felt tip and a brush felt tip. The brush tip allows you to change the thickness of your strokes while the normal felt tip is one thickness of strokes.

So whether or not you think you have pretty handwriting or know cursive, you can learn calligraphy.

Go ahead and try to learn basic hand lettering, start with my blog How to do Faux Calligraphy, then you don’t need any fancy tools, just a pen and paper!