World Calligraphy Day 2017

In order to prepare for World Calligraphy Day we’ve spent the past week equipping ourselves with calligraphy nibs and having a go at some fancy writing. We’re starting pretty much from no skill so don’t expect to see perfection! Here we’d like to show what we got up to and show off what even the most novice of writers can do with a little spare time.

First of all we needed some sort of script to practise with. We’ve had a sample pack of Introduction to Calligraphy Lettering enjoying a lovely extended break at the bottom or our drawers for a while now so today was the perfect excuse to dig it back up. It has a good selection of different font faces printed on large card to copy and trace from with a stroke by stroke guide to get you started.

Each font has a recommended nib to suit the stroke styles. In our case, the Gothic type fonts need a wide flat nib so we went with a 1.9mm on the Lamy Joy Calligraphy and a very fat 3mm nib on a dip pen.

For paper, the usual suspect – Rhodia pads. With the plain sheets, we printed slanting lines to help keep our form. We also used some of the Clairefontaine handwriting books as they have some nice grids and lines to help space out your letters and strokes. While we were practising, we used Lamy inks, save the exotic stuff (read: expensive inks) for later!

The last ingredient is time and patience! Find a relaxing quiet place, sit comfortably at your desk and keep breathing. Have your paper angled so you can keep the entire length of your writing arm resting on the table. Remember not to rush… it is all about keeping a slow and steady pace.

Pause for a moment to check your strokes against the template and mentally note what you can improve on in your next go. Even after just a couple of lines of practising you can really notice the difference between your first few attempts and the last.

We’d love to see what you guys have been writing too! World Calligraphy Day is all about trying new things and sharing what you’ve done. If you’d like to join in, send us an email or post some good old mail of any calligraphy you’ve been doing, even just your practise sheets or scrawlings on scrap paper. We’ll show them all off in a follow up post!

If you’re interested, we’ve gathered up a small collection of items we think a budding calligrapher may want to start with, you can browse them here.