9 Comments

These are beautiful and look like you had a lot of fun. My husband is interested in calligraphy, so I'll share these with him. Also, when you're centering, do you start the word with a middle letter and work outward. And did you let one of your kids help you with some of the backgrounds? I also liked the ideograms in the background of "Exotic is your neighbor's normal." Great post, Justus. Can't wait to see more.

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Thanks! And yes, I usually work from the center and go towards the right. Then I work backwards to the start of the word. I also normally go from the bottom to the top. Since I'm a lefty this order minimizes the chance of a smudge! I've also worked out a bunch of templates on autocad that lets me quickly center a composition on a light table.

As for the kids, I have a massive pile of old drawings and scrap papers that were scanned and rescued from the recycle bin for this calligraphy exercise. It was fortuitous timing that we didn't buy a scanner before the hobby had grabbed me!

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Love that you rescued your kids' drawings. They really add a whimsical flare to the very disciplined calligraphy.

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VERY cool.

You're a fan of Pilot parallels, right? Do you have an easy(ish) way of swapping ink with them? I used to have a few, but switched to calligraphy pens because switching ink was a lot easier. (But I'm still using fountain pen ink, which isn't exactly ideal for those kinds of pens.)

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Thanks!! As for swapping inks I don’t have a great solution. I have four 6.0mm pens so that gives me a bit of flexibility, but now that you mention it, that might be why I’ve been playing with brushes lately!

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hi! :) These are are fabulous. I love all the different variations.

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Thanks! I’m curious how things will play out for future 5WP’s. I had dabbled with horizontal in September but now I’m really pushing things around! It will be interesting to see if this is just an initial flourishing that will land at a new normal or if there is a lot more to room to roam on a 8.5x11 page.

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You'll have to ask your hand and see what it likes ✌️

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Yup! Very true!

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