u/chewwu9944

Forgot to upload :')

("Days of being gnomes" has a nice ring to it is for reasons passing understanding a thought that came to my mind.)

Was looking at old notebooks -- I have this habit of getting into maybe one third of any notebook/journal then abandoning it to start yet another new one (in my defense, I was experimenting with paper types back then, he). So first pic is from 2024 when I had just learned about business cursives and was mostly copying letterforms. Second pic is from recently, when I just started to understand how arm writing works. I wonder what my writing would look like another two years from now.

Knuckles up, as it turns out, is how one gets to rest on the nails of their third and fourth fingers. Everyday I dig up some comment by a fellow redditor and learn something new.

Terribly sorry for the migraine-inducing contractions in the title -- had to do it to meet the character limit. The war, by the way, is the flea bath he had to take today. He did well, yelled a lot, but is fine (and hopefully flea-free for good).

I've been curious about vintage Pilot PO nibs for quite a while now, and once again, I am in love! It writes about the same as the modern Kakuno EF (with the same ink), but with more, and very pleasant, feedback, while still retaining reasonably smooth glide. Lighter, too. I feel like I'm finally experiencing that famed sense of peace once you've found "that one pen", hnmm

Quite sloppy arm writing as the notebook was raised, so movement was awkward, but I liked to just free write for a bit after hours of actually following the rules :) Was listening to that Arabic commentator saying goodbye to Cristianno Ronaldo reel. "Salt of my tears" is such a lovely expression -- so sad, so poignant.

Filed under "don't question it".

Excellent news: The good pen hold is here to stay; my fingers have now learned to fall into place on the grip the moment I reach for a pen. In terms of getting into the rhythm, the practice drills are immensely helpful -- as I should have known :)

Neutral news: It's still a learning curve with arm writing, and a major part of that has to do with remembering to accommodate the arm and adjust writing position so as to sustain control and momentum. Most of the times I find myself too scared of losing momentum to stop, which, well, has definitely worked against me :)

Day 1 of actually reading Spencerian and Palmer's guidebooks and consistently practicing with a new "proper" pen hold and combined fingers--forearm--shoulder movement. My entire right arm is screaming ... On the bright side, I've started to notice what in my usual pen hold and writing posture that have been restricting movements. The gist of it is my palm and wrist were resting on the table as I wrote, which not only obstructed the flow but also pushed my hand backwards, causing wobbly lines. With the new pen hold (that u/MrRSharma pointed me to!), I'm now mostly focusing on keeping the wrist off the writing surface, and feeling which muscle groups help with maintaining momentum and stabilising strokes. It's honestly quite funny because while my entire body and a lifetime of muscle memories are protesting vehemently and half of the time I feel like the pen is slipping out of control, writing does actually feel easier. If I can imagine how to use my shoulder and forearm to guide the letters, then I'm able to write them -- albeit with a lot of room for development still. The drills help as well; they make sense way more now.

(Text lifted from PaperPenalia, which I found while searching how to "rest on the nails of the third and fourth fingers"... The site is offline now, but thankfully many snapshots are available and accessible via the Wayback Machine.)

...that is, new packing-tape-that-comes-with-the-boxes-of-inks day.

Not sure what I hope to hear here. It's just that when I first started writing again lined paper used to be the bane of my existence. A year later and I'd like to think I've managed to develop some semblance of spacing awareness now ... There's also the matter of armwriting which I still haven't quite grasped, especially when trying to speed up -- the upward connectors, and the "n" in particular suffer from this. Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

This is after I added a teeny tiny fraction of a dish soap drop to the 1.5 ml converter to improve the flow, which it did, but then the ink was too concentrated/saturated (?) and lost a lot of chromashading, so I added some more water to dilute it, and it turned out pretty ok in this flex-modded and very much plastic-feeded Jinhao 9016 (courtesy of Tamwingh on Taobao) -- good flow, no railroading (when writing carefully), and plenty of shades.

Edit: grammar.