First steps

[mothwing]

Again. I used to pretty much ignore the little "ink" tool in TheGimp, but it turns out that it's possible to do very shaky calligraphy with Gimp and Crocky's tablet. I'm not sure if it's worth bothering, though - the tablet doesn't translate the pressure I use very faithfully and accurately, and thus my result is pretty blotchy, which is probably due to my lack of experience than the tablet, though.

The result looks pretty much like all my first steps with a new tool - blotchy, uneven, an inky mess. The only upside to this is that I don't get inky fingers from this, the downside is that I'm not sure if I can improve.

It's about as hard as my first steps with hand-cut goose quills (having hunters in the family has its perks), and those never took off and I gave up pretty quickly and returned to metal nibs.

Edit: look, my crack at Hartmann's Der Arme Heinrich, copied from my copy of the Heidelberg manuscpript (Ba), which looks like this:

See? Blotchy. This is so much easier on paper, though the ability to just press the "undo" button when I get things wrong has its appeal. Still, it feels like cheating.

Comments

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

That looks darned good for being done with a tablet.

Re: quills--how did you learn to cut them? I've found that many sets of directions (and people who've learned from them) leave out key steps, resulting in quills that don't work well. I'm not comfortable enough cutting quills to work with them regularly yet, but I did make one in a class that works perfectly, not any more difficult to use than a metal nib, really.

(I need to practice cutting quills more, because I want to do teeny-tiny calligraphy and have pretty much hit the small limit on metal nibs.)

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :)

Actually I did it only the one time we had the goose anyway and gave up because I was so unhappy with the results. I just looked at what directions I could find online back in the day ('99, I think) and set to work. Which, in retrospect, was probably the reason why my results were so shabby.

For really small calligraphy real quills are probably much better, it's sadly true. I gave up on that when I found I couldn't get the nib-cutting right, to be honest, and stick to bigger stuff.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Did you heat-treat the quills before cutting them? You can theoretically use a burner or candle flame, but warm sand in an old crockpot is easier and less likely to burn them. It makes a HUGE difference.

The first class I took we didn't do that (among other skipped steps) and the resulting quills were utterly useless.

This is a good tutorial: http://www.flick.com/~liralen/quills/quills.html

But it is definitely one of those things that takes practice, so if you don't need to for what you're doing, there you are. :)

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

If I did heat them, I think I must have done it with a candle, I can't really remember. I think I'll give the crockpot a shot on the pheasant feathers I have lying around.

Thanks for the tutorial! It's one of the things I'd like to be able to do, because while I'm not terribly serious about my scribing exploits, it's fun and I'd like to do it properly.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I don't know how well learning from a tutorial works--especially for the cutting bits, it helps to be able to ask someone if you're doing it right. But good luck!

Pheasant quills might be a bit small, I don't know. Even (especially) for small writing, you want a bigger quill so the nib end will be fairly flat. Hence goose (traditionally) and turkey (cheap and readily available in craft stores in the US, don't know about other places).