some extracts from my calligraphy practice pages

[cimorene]

A few people mentioned interest in seeing more of my calligraphy practice.

I have only practiced calligraphy for a few years and have too many other hobbies to show off beautiful works of art such as calligraphy masters do on YouTube and in the blogosphere; I'm a dabbler only. (I also have a strong preference for insular scripts and the Art Nouveau and Art Deco lettering influenced by them over gothic blackletter, whose fussiness is understandably most popular in the field since it is so justly impressive.)






A block of text in italic script (the beginning of one of the Dirk Gently books)


A viral tweet from a few years ago in blackletter


"I'm wildly aware" is from Dirk Gently, the tv show. At the lower left corner you can see Rotunda, an Italian style combining blackletter with more rounded forms, which I've recently started practicing.


There's a great song called "I Love Trash" sung by Oscar the Grouch! These funky styles (the ones that aren't just italic) came from the Speedball textbook.




A quote from the hilarious architecture blog McMansion Hell in blackletter


The immortal words of Roger from This Old House (another Speedball textbook style)



Nearly all the samples here were drawn with Pilot Parallel Pens (in all four sizes they make), except the first 2 after the cut, which were drawn with a Rotring Artpen before I broke it. I highly recommend Parallel Pens, particularly for practice, since they're more convenient than dip pens, but also for fun. Their nibs have a thin double layer of metal that provides superior ink flow and allows you to write for as long as you want at any angle, including along the edge of the pen or even with the corner. Of course, they can't match the versatility and control of a dip pen, which can be used with acrylic inks or watercolor paints; and they take proprietary Pilot cartridges (DOWN with proprietary cartridges!!) or a rather fussy converter that has to be filled separated from the nib section. However, if you are into fountain pens and have your own bottled fountain pen inks already, then using converters or refilling the cartridges with a syringe are both convenient enough.

Comments

[lazulisong]

I'm told the parallels are actually very easy to use as an eyedropper, but considering how wildly wet mine tends to be I would uhhh proceed with caution. Pilot carts are very easy to refill tho

[cimorene]

Yeah, now that I've done that I'm annoyed that I bothered with the converters... but they do have a large capacity and the ones they came with were red and black which required using up quite a lot of boring red and black first.

[lazulisong]

Hahaha I straight up just rinsed out a black one and called it a day

[cimorene]

I'm not sure if I'm too lazy or too brainwashed by "That's Wasteful"-parents for that, but I have boxes of cartridges I saved in case I ever felt like doing that yet I still use converters everywhere but 2 pens.

[cimorene]

And honestly!! I wouldn't want to trust the threads on the Parallel pen to hold back the flow of ink... they just seem kinda... flimsy? Is the body even the same type of plastic as the nib section?? I spent hours reading some thread on FPN with people who wanted to replace the body and cap with something less ugly, but eventually it seemed they'd have to have one made to order, which seems frankly like overkill. But I'm constantly pissed off that the cap doesn't mount. I'm sure I'll lose one soon enough.

[phosfate]

OMG I am totally stealing from you, because this stuff is way more interesting to write than LIVE LOVE LAUGH and all that bullshit.

[cimorene]

I always run out of viral posts if I just start doing them, though, so I end up doing the same ones over and over. Maybe one could just use Metaquotes though. Or Know Your Meme.

Actually my parents just sent me a book of Yiddish folk songs that belonged to my grandmother and I was thinking I would use it and hope that it would teach me some Yiddish, but I've found that I just keep getting distracted and spelling everything wrong when I don't know what it means.

[linbot]

Your lettering looks very cool! I like how you write in a range of different fonts and colours.

I don't know if it would work for you, but I had some success with making a backing sheet that had vertical lines on it which were black enough that I could see them through ordinary notepaper. Then I could just use ordinary ruled paper for writing in.

I am still making progress on The Odyssey, though I was disappointed that I feel like I've backslid quite a bit after a few weeks away. But hopefully I can get back to it regularly and get through more passages about animal sacrifice and "Well, YOU don't look like peasants". :D

[cimorene]

Ordinary paper doesn't stand up to fountain pen ink, so I have a collection of Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks because they do. The ruling is an issue, though - there's new notebooks with white-on-gray ruling designed to disappear when photographed, for example, but some specific brand has the patent on it. And then there's dot grid and plain unruled paper, but it isn't as plentiful as lined and graph paper so it's difficult to buy in the size I might want. However, it doesn't matter for practice, and mostly when I make fancy stuff I use cardstock and acrylic ink anyway, so I haven't had to use lined sheets behind plain very often.