Faux Calligraphy

After weeks of moving into our apartment, we finally bought a couch. Which is great cause now when people come visit us we don't have to awkwardly suggest 'make yourselves comfortable on our floor...'. But now that the couch is in place, there is a big empty wall behind it that seems even more empty than it did when there wasn't a couch..SO I have decided to start making an art/picture gallery. 
I'm planning on actually making a lot of the art for it because 1. right now I have the time to do so, 2. saves money and 3. it is just fun. From searching for inspiration for this gallery, however, I noticed that I am drawn to work with some sort of calligraphy present. That being said, most really good looking calligraphy fonts are like $20 and you have to have some sort of Adobe software like Photoshop or Illustrator to actually use the fonts, both of which I do not have. Calligraphy kits themselves aren't that expensive, but I don't think I need the ink and the special pen to actually make things look pretty comparable. So I am faking it. And it actually doesn't look half bad. 
I don't know if this appeals to anyone else, but I figured I'd just share some of the tips I've learned in case anyone else wanted to learn how to make your writing look prettier. 

1. Find your style. There are actually quite a few different looks to calligraphy- some more bubbly than others, some thinner...etc. I suggest going to Pinterest and typing in "calligraphy" in the search bar and just looking at all the different kinds of fonts- find one or two that you really like. 

2. Practice your letters. Yeah so you know the girls who would practice their handwriting for hours to perfect it... yeah, that was me in elementary, middle, and high school. But this is what you need to do. Once you find some styles you like- copy it. Like literally trace it and practice every letter. Know what style of letter looks the best. This is important because you want the letters to all have the same style to make each word look uniform. 
3. Practice your cursive. I was always really bad at cursive. I could never really get the hang of it in third grade, so I just never used it. But now is the time to learn. Use all those letters you practiced and now just write in cursive, figuring out how to transition from letter to letter. Don't worry about trying to make it look like calligraphy, just focus on the shape, style, and transition. 
4. Enlarge the down-strokes. Basically the whole calligraphy look is achieved by fattening up your down-strokes, making sure that the beginning and end of the stroke blend back into the original print (so the middle of each down-stroke will be the thickest). You want the whole word to look cohesive and it to not just have random thick lines throughout it- blend everything so it looks nice. 
5. Practice. Write slowly, be patient, and just practice a lot. It gets easier and you will get better :)