Every month this year, I’m trying something new and documenting how it went. Check out what I’ve done in past months here. This month, I broke out my grandparents’ old calligraphy set. Spoiler alert: the ink was gone.
Many months ago, my grandma was preparing to move to Ohio to be closer to my parents, and she was clearing out some of her old things to prepare for the move. I was walking through her basement past a pile of said things when a word on the worn-looking box balanced on top of the pile caught my eye. Calligraphy.
“Can I have this?” I asked my family, who shrugged. It was mine.
It was many more months later that I finally sat down in my apartment and opened the box, which had a few red, blue, and black ink cartridges, an instruction booklet, three pen nibs, plus a pen that somehow brought it all together.
According to Wikihow, there are 4 main types of calligraphy pens: brush, dip, fountain, and felt tip. What I actually have is a fountain pen, which has removable nibs and ink cartridges.
Here’s what I thought while fiddling around with the box’s contents when I first opened it a few weeks ago:
- This instruction book is not very helpful.
- These ink cartridges don’t have any ink in them.
- I may be doing something wrong, but I don’t think this pen nib is working.
So, off to a good start.
I ordered new ink cartridges from Amazon and cleaned out the pen nib with soapy water. Then it still didn’t work, so I tried a different tip, attached a fresh cartridge, and pulled up YouTube.
This video breaks down some basic calligraphy tips and tricks. Essentially, when making upstrokes, you want to apply less pressure to the paper to create a thinner line. For downstrokes, do the opposite: draw thick lines by applying more pressure.
Pressure doesn’t make much of a difference with my fountain pen, but I did take to adding more weight to the downstrokes to thicken them. And here are the final results!
Please ignore my watercolor skills. They were hastily done and don’t count as part of this challenge (though painting watercolor leaves was also new for me…I’d give myself a -4. Don’t ask on what scale.)
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Artist Mari Andrew prompted me to think about routine vs. ritual today. I like having some sort of routine to give myself structure, but I think of rituals as having much more meaning. And sometimes I have to force myself to break out of my routine – that’s why I set this resolution to try something new every month.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqzZMsvlaMQ/
Rituals, routines, resolutions. Reflection. I’m still waiting on the revelations, but setting aside time to learn calligraphy and make some art this month did some wonders for the soul.