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Diwani practice sheets

Learn Diwani step by step: the 40-lesson path →

Diwani was the chancery hand of the Ottoman court, used for decrees and letters of state, and it was meant to look ceremonial and to be hard to forge. Its letters lean, curve back on themselves and knot together, so a Diwani word is read as a shape before it is read as letters. Below is the whole alphabet in Diwani, each letter in the four shapes it takes — alone, opening a word, inside a word and closing it — set in TE Aldwawin by the calligrapher Tharwat Emara, a licensed face. Learn the single letters here before any joining: in Diwani the joins are where the difficulty lives, because each letter bends to meet the next. It is usually studied after Ruq'ah, whose short, quick letters it resembles in skeleton. Trace opens each letter in Diwani with a reed nib cut to the script's own pen angle: trace over it and the studio measures how much of the letter you covered; the printable sheet sets the Diwani model at the top of an A4 page with rows to trace over by hand.

Sentences from the master pieces

Once the letters hold, write whole sentences. These are the complete lines of our calligrapher's Thuluth master pieces, shortest first, set here in the TE Aldwawin typeface.

Trace opens each letter in Diwani with a reed nib cut to its pen angle, measured from the letters themselves: thick and thin come from the direction you pull, with a mouse, a finger or an Apple Pencil. There are no numbered strokes; the studio measures how much of the true letter you covered. · Diwani phrases to try · the history of Diwani · for teachers

Practice sheets in the other scripts: Naskh · Thuluth · Ruq'ah · Farsi (Nastaliq)

Diwani calligraphy art for sale