DOMESTIKA COURSE – ENGLISH CALLIGRAPHY – THE LOWERCASE LETTERS
We’re really getting down to the nitty-gritty now, and beginning to learn how to shape the letters.
Lowercase letters
These fall into several different groups, according to how they are constructed. The teacher therefore didn’t teach them to us in alphabetical order, but in order of complexity.
The first group
These are formed from the basic oval with variations. I got the proportions of the first two (“i” and “t”) a bit wrong so I added them in again later. The letters are a bit narrower than I thought. They mostly have a curving line to begin them, and another one to end them. These will link up once we start making words out of them.
The second and third groups
These were a bit more complicated and combined different basic strokes. There were two variations for “k.” In the third group, there’s a little kind of flicked curve which is supposed to have a point at its beginning but I was struggling to do that with my current pen.
The fourth group
These were all the other letters, which didn’t fit into any of the previous groups. There were two variations each for “r,” “z” and “x.” You can see that I did improve as I went along each line! Some of the first ones I did weren’t very accurate.
Pen and paper
I am practising on 100 gsm printer paper, which probably isn’t the best option. I am using one of my cheap Amazon nibs which is supposed to be flexible but really isn’t.
These two elements combined are affecting the quality of my work. You are supposed to be able to get nice thick downstrokes by pressing harder with the pen, but my nib doesn’t seem to do this. Also, it is quite scratchy, and it keeps picking up fibres from the paper and making the lines thick in the wrong places.
I am improving slightly with the transition as I re-dip the pen. I watched a YouTube video this morning where someone was testing different nibs which he uses for drawing rather than calligraphy. He shook off a little ink onto a cloth after each dip and this helped, so I tried that too. In the next session I am going to try doing a few random pen strokes on some scrap paper to remove the excess and see how I get on with that.
On this video, he recommended a commonly-available nib, the Hunt Globe 513EF, and I have odered two of these. He was able to get some nice thick and thin lines with it, and he said it was smooth to write with. He also recommended the Brause Rose nib as a very flexible one, but he said it required practice. I shall think about that one in the future. I follow an Austrian artist on YouTube, Martin Lachmair, who does amazing imaginary cityscapes, houses and trees with pen and ink, and he gets a fantastic spatter effect by flicking with a very flexible nib. This is definitely something I want to try, and none of my existing nibs will do this.
I am going to try working on a smoother, better quality paper from now on, and see if this improves the quality and enables me to do certain things without picking up fibres.
It’s all a learning curve! At least I now have the lowercase letters under my belt, and can refer back to my practice sheets as a reminder.
In the next session, we are going to learn how to join these lowercase letters up into words. I really like this approach. We started with the basic strokes, which we then made into letters. Then joining them to form words, before moving on to the uppercase letters. When we’ve mastered all this, we will be able to think about spacing and layouts, and planning a final project.
