
Practicing this relatively simple character (is it a character? is it a pictogram? I have to find out.) reminds me of when I first started learning how to render Korean (Hangul) characters. I spent hours painstakingly practicing the characters, writing them over and over and over again in my homework journal. I would take my journals to Gahk So Sunim who was trying his best to teach me something about the language. In the beginning, he would look at my meager efforts and suck in his breath through his front teeth. “Very bad student!” he would playfully tell me, “Maybe first or second grade!” Then he would burst out laughing. After some months went by, he assessed my penmanship as “Middle school maybe..”
It takes me forever to do a few pages of Om's. Plus, as you can see, they all run uphill and get smaller as I go across the page. I think it's because my hand got tighter and tighter as it headed for the end of the line and just wanted to get things over with. Also – I've yet to make even one Om that is close to the graceful one shown in the youtube video.
I have learned a bit about the two types of pens I've been using for this practicing.. I don't particularly like either one of them. The extra fine point Sharpie seems not fine enough and bleeds into the Moleskine paper if I give it half a chance. The Uni-Ball Vision fine point skips a lot, especially at the beginning of a stroke. This, as you can imagine is aggravating because you have to go back and patch things up. Things don't look the same when they're patched. JQ uses Rapidograph pens. Maybe at some point, I'll get off my butt and get a set.
I fixed the the characters running uphill in all different sizes by making a thick grid of 1/2” squares that I just slip behind the Moleskine page. The faint bounding box visible through the thin journal paper made it immediately easier to render the Om. I didn't have to worry about size or positioning etc. I'm pretty sure we used paper with square boxes on it when we were learning our cursive penmanship at St Patrick's in Lynn.

One thing I know we used at St Patricks was a tracing sheet. In first and second grade when we were learning our printed and cursive letters, we had special worksheets that had the characters in faint dotted lines. Our job was to trace the characters – I guess to build up muscle memory about how the characters were supposed to look. Even in some of my early Korean workbooks, there were tracing pages. I've poked around using the Google and cannot find a anything like that for Vedic Om's.