C17: Day 166 & 167 – v, x, r, n, m, b, h, y

June 16, 2017

Those damn ascender and descender loops are bastards. That is all.  

Read the full article →

C17: Day 165 – i, u, w j, l, t, f, k

June 14, 2017

The way that the Vitolo book groups letters together makes a lot of sense – there’s a huge similarity between an i, u and w, for example. Anyway, here’s my practice.

Read the full article →

C17: Days 163 & 164 – c, e, o, s, a, d, g, q

June 13, 2017

More practice, but this time with proper (ish) technique!

Read the full article →

C17: Days 161 & 162 – That thing where you read the instructions

June 11, 2017

I do love plunging in to a project and just cracking on with it, but it’s sometimes my undoing. It turns out, I’ve been doing some of my letters wrong. I was really struggling with forming half-decent letter shapes, especially the ‘e’ and some of the upstrokes, so I went back to the handbook (pdf) that […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 160 – Yet more practice

June 9, 2017

More practice!  

Read the full article →

C17: Day 159 – More practice

June 8, 2017

More exercises! And my worksheet:

Read the full article →

C17: Day 158 – More calligraphy exercises

June 7, 2017

Practice makes perfect, or at least, slightly less wobbly. Update: I was in a rush last night, but yesterday I started on the lessons I found on zanerian.com, the first being: I also had difficulty again with the Indian Red ink, which might be because I can’t actually dip the whole nib in because the […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 157 – A change of pace

June 6, 2017

Sometimes, my subconscious does things all by itself and I just have to follow where it leads. Today is one such day, so instead of calligraphy we have what might be loosely termed “a comic”. I’ll note here that I am not an artist, cannot draw comics, and I certainly can’t draw people*, but I do […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 156 – Yesterday, part 2

June 5, 2017

So beer and calligraphy didn’t appear to mix too well last night. Who knew? So I’m having another go at yesterday’s exercise and I think I’ve done a better job.

Read the full article →

C17: Day 155 – Ink flow

June 4, 2017

I nearly forgot to do my practice today, and it’s possible that calligraphy and beer don’t mix too well. I seemed to have either too much ink in the nib, or not enough. The worksheet is on the left, my paltry efforts on the right.  

Read the full article →

C17: Day 154 – Getting the nib in the holder correctly

June 3, 2017

I was searching for more worksheets online this morning when I stumbled on a whole book about penmanship, including a section on how to use an oblique holder. It seems that I had my holder the wrong way round, so today I have repeated the same exercises as days 153 and 152, with the nib now at the […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 153 – Today’s calligraphic exercises

June 2, 2017

Shoulder still not impressed by the work it’s being asked to do, hence the wobbliness. The Indian Red ink is lovely, though. (Updated with better photo.)

Read the full article →

C17: Day 152 – Round hand calligraphy

June 1, 2017

Whilst I was in London, I went to the wonderful L Cornelisson & Son, the most amazing art supplies shop in the city, to pick up some ink and ask advice about calligraphy pens. I’ve always wanted to do calligraphy, but being left-handed has posed some problems. Because of how I hold a pen, so-called ‘left-handed’ pens […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 151 – How am I doing so far?

May 31, 2017

May was supposed to be a month of blogging, something quick, easy and portable as I knew I’d be travelling for most of the month. I didn’t manage too badly, though I missed six days. The blog posts haven’t been as ‘thinky’ as I thought they’d be, I will confess. I’ve been thinking a lot […]

Read the full article →

C17: Day 150 – Restingolites

May 30, 2017

One of the nice things about looking for photos for my recent (quite lazy) blog posts is that it’s reminded me that I have a huge number of photos I’ve never really looked at since I took them. Case in point: Last year, I went to Madrid and, amongst other things, had a fabulous time […]

Read the full article →