Use Sumi ink on 300 gsm hot press paper

Word of the day : https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/2026/10/12/

Pen : Pilot parallel 6mm

Ink : Sulekha Green fountain pen ink

Gillot 303, ph martin bleedproof white

A test to see how the textura looks with a bit longer text. Testing with different inks.

Hi All!

First up here is part of a Psalm that I wrote out a few weeks ago with a fairly rapid pace. Used Pilot CM nibs in two Kakunos, one inked with Platinum Carbon Black and the other with a mix of De Atrementis Document Red and Document Orange, in an attempt to make a permanent-ish vermillion. Same goes for #3. Papers were Cosmo Air Light and Midori MD, I think, respectively.

2 is a Copic marker with the broad edged calligraphy nib, written on some faux-leather.

I've been plateaued but just read Alfred Fairbank's great book, A Handwriting Manual, and so now have more of an idea of where we go from here. I would like to get back into larger forms and layouts and so plan to read "Layout and Design for Calligraphers" and focus on that for a bit. Thoughts?

For this piece, I tried as much as possible to write "naturally" as if this was my normal handwriting.

1mm brause bandzug, walnut ink.

for the small artwork on the tip, I used some watercolor pencils.

Just sharing a few recent brush pen lettering attempts as a calligrapher for over 3 years now! I haven’t ever posted anything on Reddit before, but I decided that it would be nice to show my work for once. What do you think about brush lettering and about mine?

Aviators - Armoured in Gold

Dr Ph Martin's Iridiscent Copper Plate Gold on black Rhodia Maya callgraphy paper

First time working on black paper. Had to rule up manually rather than just working with my guidelines on a separate sheet on a lightbox. That's a relatively new experience for me!

Next time I'll watch out~

Word of the day : https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/2026/10/11/

Pen : pilot parallel 6mm

Ink : Sulekha Turquoise Talisman (Turquoise Blue)

Pilot Parallel pen + ink on Strathmore Drawing paper

Uneven because I didn't put any boundaries/lines in to make things consistent - I'll do that next time! But I had fun, I think that's what matters when starting something new :)

Gillot 303, ph martin bleedpropf white

Some of my recent Gothic lettering work and sketches. Would love your feedback!

What is a ruling pen? What is a folding pen? I’ve seen them in a catalog and still don’t understand what it is they do.

Guess what class I'm taking?

Continuing my little sake label series. After Dassai, which is all heavy ink and blobby dots, and Hibiki, which is dense and confident, I wanted something from the opposite end. So today it is Fuga.

The word is 風雅 (fūga), which means elegance, refinement, good taste. Literally it is 風 (wind) plus 雅 (grace, refinement). Bashō used fūga to talk about the spirit of poetry itself, so this is not a casual word. It carries a whole aesthetic with it.

Here is the part I love. The calligrapher basically lets the wind take over. 風 is huge and takes up most of the label, and the two outer strokes are long, thin, and sweeping. The left one drops down with a slight wave, and the right one swings out and curls at the end like a gust catching something. Then the inside of 風, which is normally a fiddly little cluster, is pared way down. Most of the character is the outline of the wind and a lot of open paper. After Dassai, where the white space got squeezed out entirely, it is kind of a shock how much air there is here.

Then 雅 sits small, tucked down and to the right, much more compact and grounded. I read it as a deliberate contrast: the wind is loose and moving, and the refinement is quiet and settled underneath it. The big/small pairing is risky because the second character can end up looking like an afterthought, but here it feels like a pause after a long breath.

What gets me is that the strokes are thin and light, almost dry in places, but they do not look weak. That is the hard part with this kind of brushwork. When you go thin, every wobble shows, and there is no ink mass to hide behind. The long sweeps only work if they are done in one go with total commitment, and you can tell these were.

Small bonus for the nerds: 雅 is built from 牙 (tooth/fang) and 隹 (short-tailed bird), and one common explanation is that it was originally the name of a kind of crow before it got borrowed to mean “elegant.” So the most refined character on the bottle may have started out as a noisy black bird. I find that very funny.

Anyway, curious what you all see. Does anyone know who brushed this label? And for people who write, how do you practice those long, thin sweeps without them going shaky halfway through?

I have been practicing a medieval style page with an illustrated first letter. I know it wasn’t typical to leave big sections of page open but I thought this would be easier for my viewers to read (it’s for a short film I’m thinking of)
What does everyone think.