The looped letters: b, e, h, k, l
Okay. Fourteen lessons in, and today we're taking those ascending loops from lesson twelve and turning them into actual letters. Five of them, all at once, because once your hand knows the loop, these five come fast. Faster than the oval letters did, I think. That was true for me, anyway.
Here's the thing that makes this lesson kind of fun: b, e, h, k, and l all start the same way. Same ascending loop, same entrance stroke, same rhythm going up. The only thing that changes is what you do once you get to the top and come back down. So we're not learning five new movements. We're learning one movement and then five different endings.
The shared beginning
Every one of these letters starts with that tall loop from lesson twelve — up from the baseline, curving left at the top, coming back down thin, then swelling into a full downstroke as you press. If that loop still feels shaky, go back and do ten of them plain, no letter attached, before you start today's practice. I mean that. Don't skip ahead just because you're eager to get to real letters. The loop is the foundation and everything today sits on top of it.
b, h, k, l — one at a time
l is the simplest. Loop up, swell down, and you're done. It's basically the ascending loop with nothing added. If you can do the loop from last lesson, you can already do a lowercase l. Start here so you feel a win right away.
h is the l with a bump. Come down the downstroke, and instead of lifting your pen at the baseline, you curve right into a small hump — an overturn, from lesson nine — that brings you back up and over to set down the second half. So h is loop, then overturn. Two shapes you already know, joined together.
b is the l with a different bump. Same loop, same downstroke, but at the bottom you curve out into a small oval shape that closes back into the stem, kind of like a lowercase o attached to the side of the l. This one took me longer than h did. The oval has to be small and round, not squished, or the letter reads more like a broken h than a b.
k is the one where people tense up, so let's go slow. Loop up, downstroke down, same as always — and then a separate, second stroke branches off partway down the stem, out and back in, like a little checkmark leaning into the letter. It's two strokes, not one continuous motion, and that's fine. Lift your pen between them if you need to. There's no rule that says calligraphy has to be one unbroken line. I lift constantly.
e — the odd one out
e doesn't have an ascending loop at all. It's actually closer to the oval letters from last lesson — small, compact, sitting right on the baseline. Start with a short flat entrance stroke, curve up and around into a small loop in the middle of the letter, and close it into an oval shape, like a backwards c with a little loop tucked inside.
The e loop is tiny. That's the part people get wrong first. They draw the same size loop they just spent all lesson twelve making big and tall, and the e ends up looking bloated. Small. Almost cramped. That's correct.
A note on speed, and the gratitude thing
So this one, actually, matters more today than it has in past lessons, because these letters have more steps packed into them, and beginners speed up when there's more to remember. It's backwards from what feels natural, but slower is what you need right now, not faster.
I'll tell you what worked for me. A while back I had to practice the word "gratitude" over and over for a Relief Society thing — needed about fifty of them for place cards. Around word thirty or so, something switched. I stopped seeing "gratitude" as a word and started seeing it as just... shapes. A loop here, an oval there, a turn, a turn, a loop. My brain checked out of reading it and my hand just knew what came next.
That's the goal today. Write out b, e, h, k, l slowly enough, enough times, that they stop being letters for a minute and become shapes your hand recognizes on its own. You won't get there in one sitting. But you'll feel it start.
What to actually do at home
Get out your guideline sheet from a few lessons back. Write a full line of just l first — fifteen or twenty of them, same size, same slant. Then a line of h. Then b, then k, then e. Don't mix them yet. One letter at a time, same movement over and over, so your hand locks in each one before moving to the next.
If your k is coming out lopsided, don't fight it in place. Lift your pen, breathe, start the branching stroke over. Pushing through a bad stroke just teaches your hand the bad version.
Before next time
Get comfortable with all five, especially k, because it comes up in more words than you'd think. And do it slow enough that somewhere around letter thirty, they stop looking like letters to you too.