Just a warning to anyone else who thought that flex nibs looked interesting and, like me, didn't realize the requirements of needing to use one with existing scripts. Maybe this is obvious to a number of other people, but it wasn't to me.
I like the look of Spencerian script:
I figured, hey, I'm using a fountain pen, which unlike most other writing instruments, can take flex nibs and with them, do variable-width lines. Why not give Spencerian a shot?
I finally got a nib that has decent line width variation, a Fountain Pen Revolution EF Ultra Flex, and put it on a pen, and started practicing letter forms.
I promptly sliced through the paper. Repeatedly.
I took a closer look and realized what was going on.
Usually, when writing in cursive, the pen is at something like 45° from the line of text. I was doing the same when trying to write in Spencerian.
If you intend to write in Spencerian or Copperplate script, the nib must be perpendicular to the line of text, so that a vertical downward stroke is pulling directly towards the pen.
The calligraphy crowd typically uses dip pens that amount to just a nib, and can stick the thing in an oblique holder, so they can have their hand at a 45° angle to the paper, like normal, but still keep the nib aligned perpendicular to the line of text.
But a fountain pen user can't do that. They'd have a huge, unwieldy fountain pen hanging off an oblique holder. If they want to write in a script that requires that nib alignment, they must rotate their hand relative to the paper, and retrain themselves to write that way.
If you aren't really wanting to retrain yourself to write at a 45° angle from normal, you probably can't use flex-nib fountain pens to do Spencerian or Copperplate or similar.
4 Comments
CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 4d
I also have that nib, it does flex quite nicely. If you really intend to learn Spencerian or similar scripts it would be most helpful to get an oblique holder and nib to dip indeed. For fountain pens, you can try to rotate the paper so that it aligns a bit more with your down stroke, as well as rotate your wrist a bit to align more with the paper. I do practice arm based writing with business penman ship. It's the script that came after Spencerian and is similar except with no shades (thick down strokes). Personally, if I rotate my paper to flex more easily, my muscle memory gets all messed up so I'm quite bad at it. Usually I rotate my wrist and hold the pen in a really funky angled way. All wrong, I'm sure!
tal@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 4d
Thanks. Some good thoughts there.
Yeah...
I mean, I wasn't specifically set on Spencerian. It was just appealing because it was mature and had a more-elaborate appearance and was already designed to be written with variable-width lines.
Yeah...I mean, one could just move where the wide strokes are in the letters to a different place, where the wide stroke are aligned with one's hand placement pulling down. That'd create variation, though it'd look pretty bizarre.
If anyone made a flex nib that bent at a 45⁰ angle, that might do it. Like...a fude nib, but bent to the right instead of up. It'd have to be a nib that mounts in such a way that it wouldn't unscrew or something when torque is applied to it. But modern flex nib fountain pens are already a niche field. I'm not sure how many nib manufacturers are going to want to risk R&D time on something like that.
And maybe some other scripts that aren't really intended to be written with a variable-width pen would be more amenable to it.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slant_(handwriting)
Spencerian and Copperplate have slants of 52⁰ and 55⁰, respectively. If one used a script with a slant of 90⁰ and then added width to vertical lines, that might look less weird, and be less prone to the paper being cut. Those scripts aren't designed for variable-width lines, though.
sighs
Honestly, though, I think that realistically, the ideal would be to have a script designed around a flex nib held at a modern cursive angle.
tal@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 4d
Apparently cancelleresca corsiva ("Chancery Cursive"), a sixteenth-century Italian script, is written with the pen held at roughly the 45° angle (Wikipedia says 45° and the image I provided below says 45°, but I also see some that say 30°). Two drawbacks, from my standpoint:
It looks, from what samples I see online in old manuscripts and in recreations, like it was really aimed at something analogous to a stub nib, not a flex nib, where the line width is determined entirely by the angle of the stroke. One could still write it with a flex nib, but not much point.
It doesn't look like it's cursive in the sense that I think of cursive, where there's a single stroke moving from letter to letter. Some samples online seem to have the pen be down between some letters, but not in the consistent sense that modern cursive does; it looks much closer to printing.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ce28636a-c35e-45c3-a3d3-ae38781a8a21.png
It doesn't look entirely-standardized, either; I see a lot of variation among samples online.
EDIT: No! I'm wrong. Line width---at least in the variant in the above image---is not entirely determined by stroke angle. If it were, it wouldn't be possible to get the tail of the "j" to come to a point; it'd look more like the tail on the "f". It's much closer to being entirely determined by stroke angle than the examples of Spencerian that I've seen, though.
tal@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 4d
One thought: If you're left-handed, on the other hand, and have already trained yourself to use underwriting to avoid smudging fountain pen ink, and you use some pen angle that is approximately vertical already, then you may have lucked out, if you want to use a flex nib. You already did the necessary training.