The Coffeenist Manifesto is an idea that's been knocking around in my sketchbooks for ages. Today, it was finally time to do a “real” take (or four, because of typos 🙄)
I love Sheila Waters' Caroline miniscule, but damn is it hard to maintain (or even measure) a 3º slant.
🖊️ Leonardt Roundhand #3, Brause 2mm
Daniel Smith walnut ink
📄 Midori MD A4
Second H is a little too wide but oh well
🖋️ Pilot Parallel 3.8mm
Platinum Sepia Black
📄 ordinary A6 stationery
I don’t know Hebrew, so I went off the exemplar in the Speedball Textbook. Rustica seemed like the natural pairing due to the crazy steep nib angle and similarity in shape of the serifs (just that Hebrew letters put them at the top and Rustica has them at the bottom)
🖋️ Speedball C-0 (Hebrew), Hunt 512 (niqqud), Leonardt Roundhand #1½ (Rustica)
Fox & Quills Jane Austen (iron gall is the traditional choice for scripture), Liquitex iridescent bronze acrylic ink
📄 some random A6 notebook - mediocre regular stationery that didn’t want to pull ink off the nib
This was actually unintentional. I hadn’t practiced upright italic before, and I was just trying to use up a nib-load of ink on used paper after writing something else. The first P ended up looking pretty good, so I just went with it. Iron gall has a really dry flow, so in fine Brause nibs it gives me a lot of control.
The pink marks are from (bad) letters that I did two years ago (no sense letting a few blank square inches of good paper go to waste, lol)
🖊️ Brause 1mm
Fox & Quills Iron Throne
📄 Maruman SOHO Sketchbook B5 (I like this paper)
I got a couple flat brushes and some gouache the other day.
How can we take a craft that already has very little margin for error and make it even more difficult? Do it with a brush! The bristles on this damn thing reflect a 1 bpm difference in your heart rate, yet they move as if through mud when you actually twist the handle, lol.
Obviously not good so I might not leave this up but I like using WotD as a space to explore new techniques and/or weird ideas (normally I don't like using an entire sheet for one word).
🖌️ Royal & Langnickel Flat Shader #12
Meeden gouache, Brilliant Purple
📄 Kyowa sketchbook A4 (from Daiso)
saw u/igorrto2's post from earlier today and couldn't resist rewriting his text in actual medieval style, with iron gall ink (железистые чернила) and everything.
On the left is полуустав, on the right is устав. I was doing it from memory and I haven't written either script in a while, so there are a couple slightly wrong letterforms in the устав (the first Ы and Ф) as well as other obvious errors and false starts. It takes forever to write anything substantial in устав, though, and I wasn't able to improve on that attempt today.
🖊️ Tape 2mm (полуустав), Leonardt Roundhand #1½ (устав)
Fox & Quills Victoria (полуустав), Fox & Quills Beetle Juice (устав)
📄 off-brand paper similar to Kokuyo Campus loose-leaf
🖊️ Leonardt Roundhand #1½
Fox & Quills Peacock
📄 Maruman Mnemosyne B5
Awake after midnight so I figured I’d get ahead of the game 😅
Not really happy with it, but this is the best I could do before the day ended (almost midnight US Eastern time). I spent all day reworking different ideas (some with more text and complicated compositions, and other scripts than this) but just couldn’t nail it. So I just decided to do the word alone. This is still not really at the level I wanted to submit, but I guess I just don’t have it today :/
🖋️ Tape 4mm
Fox & Quills Iron Throne
📄 Li Wey scrap paper (Taiwanese product) 18K, roughly B5 size
🖋️ Tape 4mm
Diamine Shimmering Seas
📄 Itoya Romeo A5
Baseline drifts, composition is bad, but this was just something quick. Couldn’t pass up an opportunity for an ST ligature, but I didn’t want to spend much time on such a short word - you get the gist ;)
Got a bunch of ink samples recently, of both fountain pen and non-FP inks. I used to think fountain pen ink was convenient for broad-edge calligraphy since it’s easy to clean, but in the end I’ve concluded that colorful fountain pen inks are best in normal fountain pens - FPs bring them to life, juicy and sheeny, while broad nibs (including Parallel Pens and other calligraphy FPs) tend to make them look dull.
🖊️Platinum Preppy 0.3
Platinum Citrus Black (iron gall)
📄Elephant True Write Classic Cream (A5 pad), bought in Thailand. Similar to Kokuyo Campus paper
✍🏻 non-dominant hand (right hand)
📝 random real (old) newspaper headlines from the book “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim”
🖋️ Speedball Steel Brush ¼”
Platinum Sepia Black
📄 Kyowa spiral-bound A4 sketchbook from Daiso (too toothy for most calligraphy, but flat brush, steel brush, and Plakat-style poster nibs work well)
🖋️ Parallel Pen 3.8mm & 1.5mm
Pilot Iro-shizuku Ku-jaku
📄 Fabriano Ingres A4
🖋️ Brause 2mm
Fox & Quills “Iron Throne”
📄 back of a boarding pass
Recently got a whole haul of Fox & Quills iron gall inks, as I’ve seen calligraphers like PAScribe and Nina Tran rave about them. My prior (first) experience with IG ink was KWZ Misty Red, which I really liked. But most of these inks are bone-dry and slow down writing quite a lot. They also lay down rather pale once the nib is down to half-full, so you have to dip frequently.
Thankfully iron gall ink performs well even on fairly suboptimal writing surfaces (I chose a boarding pass here as a stress test), so I can reserve my good paper for more feather-prone inks.
My original plan to mark my official entry into old middle age 👴🏻 fell through (the Stockholm half marathon), so I wrote this instead. There are forty words written here, representing 55+ languages, among which all 24 official EU languages are represented.
I originally wanted to write each language in the first script they were written in after adopting the Latin alphabet, but that turned out to be too tricky (plus I don't know any Gothic hands other than Gothicized italic). But the final grouping consists solely of languages that did not adopt the Latin alphabet until the 20th century, so Foundational is an apt choice for that group.
Some strokes are a little rough because I was near the bottom of my jar of walnut ink, and it was getting chunky, plus the paper was a bit soft.
I am aware that there is a typo in czterdzieści and a near-typo in nelikümmend.
| Nib | Script | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Leonardt Roundhand #2½ | Uncial | forty (English), førti (Norwegian), fyrre (Danish), fyrtio (Swedish), fjörutíu (Icelandic) |
| Brause 3mm | Inscriptional caps | σαράντα (Greek) |
| Mitchell Poster 4mm | Rustica | quadraginta |
| Leonardt Roundhand #1½ | Italic | <c/q>uar<a/e>nt<a/e> (almost all Romance languages), patruzeci (Romanian) |
| Brause 4mm | Insular majuscule | daichead (Irish) |
| Leonardt Roundhand #1½ | Gothicized italic | vierzig (German), Veertig (Dutch/Afrikaans), Véierzeg (Luxembourgish) |
| " | " | četrdesmit (Latvian), čtyřicet (Czech), četrdeset (Croatian) |
| " | " | štyridsať (Slovak), štrideset (Slovene) |
| Leonardt Roundhand #2 | Caroline miniscule | negyven (Hungarian), neljäkymmentä (Finnish), nelikümmend (Estonian) |
| Brause 4mm | Ustav | сорок (Russian/Ukrainian), четиридесет (Bulgarian) |
| " | " | czterdzieści (Polish), dyzet (Albanian) |
| " | " | erbgħin (Maltese), keturiasdešimt (Lithuanian) |
| Speedball C-3 | Foundational | afartan (Somali), amashumi amane (Xhosa/Zulu), apatnapu (Tagalog) |
| " | " | arobaini (Swahili), binaani (Bambara), bốn mươi (Vietnamese) |
| " | " | empat puluh (Malay/Indonesian), efapolo (Malagasy), iri anọ (Igbo) |
| " | " | kırk (Turkish), ñeent-fukk (Wolof), qırx (Azeri), whā tekau (Maori) |
I translated the quote a little more liberally so that the lines of the English version would break comfortably in the same way and the punchline would have an equally punchy rhythm as the original.
🖋️ Tape 1.5mm, Kuretake Sumi, 📄 too-soft A3 dry media paper
The script is called Foundational Hand (I've seen it called "основной шрифт" or "базовое письмо" in Russian sources). It was created by Edward Johnston, the British calligrapher who revived broad-edge calligraphy (каллиграфия плоским пером) in the early 20th century. The scirpt is a modern adaptation of the letters in a 10th-century manuscript (the Ramsey Psalter); Johnston called it "Foundational" since it is a good starting point to learn how the broad-edge pen works. It is also fairly easy to adapt to Cyrillic letters.
If you are wondering about the Bulgarian-style к/ж, the letterforms are based on [the alphabet in «Каллиграфия» by Илья Богдеско](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/211174979003817/) and [some random exemplar](https://penlovers.ⓇⓊ/chema-postroeniya-bukv-osnovnogo-shrifta/) I found a long time ago.
Quote by unknown author, translation mine
🖋️ Tape 1.5mm, Kuretake Sumi, 📄 too-soft A3 dry media paper
The Cyrillicized version is based on the alphabet in Ilya Bogdesko’s “Calligraphy” (Илья Богдеско, «Каллиграфия») and some random exemplar I found on Pinterest a long time ago.
There is definitely more than one way to skin a cat regarding the lowercase letters б, в, д, ж, к, л, м, т, я in Foundational. I found it interesting that Bogdesko opts for Bulgarian-style ж/к (with ascenders). I prefer the “sideways VHS” style в because it has a connection to скоропись (Skoropis’), which is very roughly the Cyrillic analog to Bâtarde or Gothic cursive.
This is a photo from summer 2012 of my then-gf’s cat. I currently live in a coastal tropical city where it’s 30°C, jungle-humid, and egg-fryingly sunny by 7:30am and this is pretty much how I feel these days.
I went from running a 1:43 half-marathon in March to barely ever leaving my apartment because it’s just too damn hot, lol.
I am a lefty but taught myself to write with my right hand over the past couple of years (late 30s). I do calligraphy with my right hand as well, but I decided to try mirror writing for International Left-Handers’ Day. It was as awkward for me as it would be for any righty!
- Top image: what I wrote
- Middle image: taking advantage of the bleed-through; I’m looking at the reverse, and part of the front side is reflected in the mirror
- Bottom image: the full reflection of the front side in the mirror
Parallel Pen 3.8mm, some thick scrap paper (peculiar Taiwanese size), Cánh Diều Olive Green
Imagine if Ancient Roman netizens had to put up not only with cookie notifications (Ep. 1), but rate limiting and captchas to prove they were human, too.
Nibs: Tape 1mm (browser tab title, address bar, Cloudflare branding); Mitchell #1 (page heading); Mitchell #2½ (Body text); Tape 2mm (checkbox text); Hunt 512; Sailor Shikiori brush pens
Ink: Walnut ink, Kuretake Sumi, Sailor Shikiori autumn series brush pens (Okuyama, Kinmokusei, Yamadori, Chushu)
Paper: Some suboptimal A3 dry-media paper
As someone who has had the dehumanizing experience of an job interview conducted by an AI 🙄
Tape 2mm and 4mm, Sumi ink, A3 dry-media paper
Tried a few different iterations of this quote, centered, in landscape format on A5, A4, and A3 paper (with the first clause in Uncial also). Centering is hard so I gave up on that and did it in portrait instead 😅