I ordered a Speedball Oblique holder to try and help with learning Copperplate Calligraphy.
I’ve heard about the limitations of this holder, which I think may be a decent trade-off considering it’s availability and price. It’s only a couple of pounds GBP, and plenty of places sell them, so I thought why not?
The limitations appear to be primarily the fact that you can’t adjust either the angle of the flange, nor anything on the flange itself. The only thing that can adjust is the “reach” of the flange, which emerges out from the top of of the holder so the nib ends up further away from the end of the holder in cases where you’ve got a grip really far up the top of the shaft.
Another thing that’s not adjustable is the radius of the flange. There’s a rim in the flange that’s of a fixed radius so you’re limited as to what nibs can fit in. That rim also has a fixed depth, too, further limiting what nibs you can use. You want the point of your nib to be in line with the centre of the shaft of the holder, and it seems that most nibs you’ll try (that are non-Speedball) will end up “proud” of that centreline and overshooting. This might end up with having to hold the pen at odd angles in order to keep the nib true to your writing angle, and might even end up resulting in handling issues such as stabbing the paper.
The nib that did work for me was one that I bought in a small bundle of taster nibs described in a previous post – the Gillott 303. The shank of this nib fits the radius of the flange perfectly, and slots in fully so the flange is all the way in. The point appears to be pretty much bang on, too.
Now that I’m kitted up with a new pointy nib (I was using the Leonardt Point until now) on the oblique holder, I thought it be best to start again with the fundamentals – and already I was starting to see progress. This is likely down to me going back to basics and learning strokes properly rather than the equipment itself, however.
At this point, I hadn’t gotten round to getting the correct angles for my guide sheets, I think these are about 80 degrees or so. Proper angled guidelines will be coming later (once I fix my printer).
I think I’ve found as fun as it is just to throw yourself into it and get the pen moving and trying to recreate examples you see – nothing actually beats sticking to the rules and learn these basic strokes, like you see in the top left of my example above. It’s a bit like learning a musical instrument – you can learn tunes you like, you can come up with your own things, but your own things sometimes make much better sense when you go back to the basics with scales, broken chords and arpeggios. The technical fundamentals underlie the entirety of the craft and should never be neglected! (Few exceptions aside, like ‘gifted’ naturals and prodigies who take to new skills with some apparent natural talent, for the rest of us the ‘talent’ just comes with practice. Lots of practice.).
Jim Scribbles 