[egypturnash]

Here is a trick for learning how to make your hand “hover” that I was taught by the old pros when I joined the animation industry.

Take a pencil. A wooden one, not a mechanical one. Sharpen it. Then hold it so that the entire side of the exposed cone of graphite touches the paper, rather than the tip. Your thumb will be on one side of the pencil, with all four fingers in a row on the opposite side, rather than sort of clustered around the front of the pencil.

Now try to draw some lines. You will get very broad lines and probably have little control, because this grip forces you to keep your wrist still, and gives you very little room for your fingers to move the pencil either. It will feel very weird and awkward at first! You’ll have to make a bunch of big, broad motions because you’ve probably never tried to make fine motions like this with your arm in your entire life. It’s okay, you’ll get better!

A great way to get better: take a piece of paper, and draw a circle in the upper left corner, just barely touching the edges of the paper. Don’t worry about making a nice circle, don’t go over it multiple times, just make one simple sorta-circular gesture. Now move to the right and draw another circle, just touching the first one and the tip of the paper. Repeat for a whole row, then do another row that just touches the bottom of the previous row, until you’ve filled the whole page.

Your circles will probably look better by the end of the page. I did this every morning as a warm-up for one of my first animation jobs, and the circles got a lot better, and tighter, over the course of not much time.

Once you have learnt this, you can easily transfer this new control of your arm motions to tools held in other grips. I mostly work digitally, and have to address the tablet with the stylus’ tip for it to register, but I still move my arm with the fluidity learnt from this exercise.

As a bonus this is also a lot better for your arm. Keeping the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fairy away is very much a thing grizzled old animators wanted to teach the new kids coming in, they’d seen great careers cut short by injuries.

(You could also probably keep holding the pen in a more vertical fashion and use a wrist brace to keep your wrist from moving, if this is all too damn weird for you.)

[wrycoder]

That's the way artists hold a pencil. I don't think that calligraphers use that method.

As an unusual example, here[0] is something like Palmer script being written by an Indian. It's unique, the hand is positioned almost directly below the letter being written! The author claims they are using a 0.9 mm pencil, even though the writing looks like it was written with a pen. I think they flatten the lead to a bevel edge and use that for the downstrokes, while sliding the edge sideways for the thins. Exceptional motor control, I'm jealous.

[0] https://youtu.be/8RtY9IZ9W-g

[egypturnash]

It’s a way artists hold a pencil; I don’t hold my stylus anything like that on a day-to-day basis. It’s a useful grip that I’d be constantly using if I was still working with a pencil, and more importantly, it’s a grip that forces you to learn how to draw from your shoulder, rather than resting the weight of the hand on the paper and pivoting from there. This changes everything about how you write and draw, once you get used to it.

And damn, that’s a heck of a video! It feels more to me like the pencil tip is left normal, with the line weight variance coming from very controlled variation of the pressure; you’ll notice that all the fat lines are coming when they’re pulling down. All the upstrokes are pale and thin, if they put the same pressure into those they’d probably be gouging holes in the paper. A .9mm mechanical pencil is surprisingly expressive compared to a .5 or thinner!

Edit: I just took a .7mm mechanical out and tried some similar writing; pressure can indeed do most of the line weight variety seen there.

[Tomte]

Thanks! The circle exercise is still being done with the "sideways pencil", right?

[egypturnash]

Yes!

You could probably do other shapes too, penmanship manuals have a lot of swoopy curves to practice if you want to develop nice handwriting. I just did circles because animators really love roughing stuff out with circles.