Order’s arrived, regular work day is over (I’m not furloughed!), and now it’s time to put pen to paper.
First step was diligent preparing the nib for first use, which I did using toothpaste – rubbed between first finger and thumb then rubbed all around the tip of the nib to get rid of that lacquer, then rinsed with warm water to get it all off. I forgot to do the same with the WM reservoir at first, so don’t forget to do that too, as although it might not be coated in a lacquer (it shouldn’t need it I don’t think as it’s brass) it will have oil from your fingers on it and make it hydrophobic.
The result? Well. Messy. But fun! I didn’t follow any specific tutorials on what to do, I found a chart of the basic Uncial letters somewhere and followed the strokes to try and reproduce what was there.
The letter “A” proved to be tricky, so I spent some time just drawing the main backstroke to get handle on how to get the ink flowing, how hard you need to press, how fast to stroke and what angle to hold the pen at.
Eventually I got the hang of the letter A (which someone pointed out that they look like lambdas (λ), which I guess they do when repeated like this!
After this, I set about working on the next letter which involves basic curves (rather than straight strokes of the letter A).
I can’t remember which sized nib I actually used (this post was written retrospectively, about 3 weeks after I actually started learning), but you can see on the third line I decided to switch down to a narrower nib, and by the fourth line towards the end I was getting the hand of ink flow. No where near what I’d call “good”, but it felt like I was getting somewhere, knowing that just doing this over and over would eventually get better.
And eventually, I decided to complete the alphabet – one line at a time rather than a page. I think I was getting the impression that if you over-practice a motion then you might exaggerate bad habits that I didn’t know I had – not only that but it gets boring after two or three lines of the same letter.
The culmination of a few days of practice, resulting in my first “work” – a reproduction of an photograph that was shared widely on Twitter during the anti-lockdown protests during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
Spacing is difficult to master, but I guess that’s one of the many things that comes with practice!
Jim Scribbles 