Happy birthday in cursive

In the example, the H is built from two stems and a looped crossbar at the midline. It ends there, and the a starts fresh just to its right. The B works the same way: its lower bowl closes back at the stem, and the i begins on its own. Leave a small, even gap after each capital rather than forcing a connecting stroke. The lowercase letters after each capital are all joined.

Happy has two p's and a y, all of which drop below the baseline. Keep their loops the same length and the same slant so they read as a set. The p's loop closes back at the baseline before climbing into the next letter, and the y's loop crosses its own stem at the baseline to finish the word. In Birthday, the final y matches the one in Happy, which gives the phrase a tidy balance.

Birthday has two pen lifts to plan for: the i dot and the t cross. The r uses the traditional shape with a small shoulder at the midline, then the t rises above it and the h loop goes up to the headline. Write the whole word first, then go back to dot the i and cross the t. The d is a tall straight stem, not a loop.

On a card, pencil a straight baseline first. Happy Birthday is long, so it is easy to drift uphill. Write it at full size once on scrap paper to see how much width you need. Leave about the width of an o between Happy and Birthday. If you paste the Unicode version into a design, remember it is a font style, not connected handwriting, so it will not join like the image.