writing and drawing with a dip pen

So, I'm not very good yet.  But I decided the other day that I wanted to try dip pen calligraphy.  More spicifically, I want to write in Spencerian calligraphy and this seemed like a good tool to add to my arsenal.  

It's way harder than it looks.

See

Day one



Day two



Day three



Not feeling like I'm making any improvement yet, but it's only day three.  

I got the practice sheet from the postmans knock.  The site has some great free downloads for practising penmanship.  

My dip pen practices are improving slightly.  

My biggest problem is that my eyes can't see what I'm supposed to be following.  Or more to the point, I can't analyze what I'm looking at.  This is the same problem I'm having with my penmanship practice.  I can trace the letters, but when it comes time to drawing them without a guide, I forget how they go.  Very frustrating and I suspect related to my dyslexia and my slowness to learn to spell/write/read.  It takes weeks dedicated to learning to spell each word and in school, they would 'teach' us 20 to 50 words a day.  That was far too fast.

The next problem - ink feathering/bleeding.  I switched from fountain pen ink to calligraphy ink (which feels more like paint, it's so thick) which has solved most of this problem.  Maybe later, I'll get some better paper.

Today I tried something different since I'm 'writing' in 'paint', I decided to treat my nib more like a paintbrush.  Instant improvement.  

The dip pen is sensitive to the angle and the way we hold it.  It's a lot more like a paintbrush than a pen and remembering that seems to be the key for me to get the hang of stuff.

But I am having trouble with the grip so I'm posting pictures here in hopes of gettins some thoughts on how to improve.

The straight holder is very easy for me to use, but the oblique holder seems to force my hand on its side which makes it hurt.  

Gosh, it's been a while.

What would I tell myself nearly 8 years later?

Mostly, forget about writing, drawing is where you'll (aka, past me) will fall in love with this medium.


1. G-nib for the win.  

G nibs are used by comic and manga artists and can draw a great range of line width from a single nib.  Because it is often used in commercial industry, the nib is much easier to find, cheaper, and more durable than fancy nibs.  Even when my nib gets a bit old, and can't do the finest lines, it can still be useful for thicker marks with less precision which looks good in sketching. Then use a new nib for the finest details.

2. Ink

Manga ink 4 is my current favourite.  It dries quite quickly, matte, and doesn't seem to fuss about what paper.  It's also waterproof when...i want to say dry, but all these inks seem to need more time than just dry to finish bonding to the paper.  

W&N black spider picture on the bottle ink is also a favourite.  I'm half way through my third bottle, but they do seem to dry up on their own when lwss than a quarter full.  It's more fussy about paper than manga ink.

Kuretake has an ink I'm keen to try as this is another Manga supply.  It looks good for drawing on various paper types.

3. Paper

This is where I faltered the first 10 times I tried this.

Printer paper is crap.  Most mixed media paper is pretty good,  watercolour paper is also fairly good.  But always test that nib, ink, and paper will be friends first.  Before starting a fancy drawing.   Smooth paper is often recommended, but I am falling in love with less smoth rag paper lately because the paper can help give different effects.

4. Practice.

Now I've played around a bit, it's time to find some exercises to help me understand how to achieve different values and textures.  What direction to hatch when and when not to hatch, but make a different kind of mark?

5. Handle

Get one that is wood or at least not a plastic that feels uncomfortable.  The manga nib holders are plenty good enough and often come with 10 g-nibs on sale.

John and I have been playing with dip & fountain pens for the last several months. He's been practicing far more than I, and with a stronger focus on calligraphy. I'm embarrassed at this point to admit to the number of pens, inks, and papers we've accumulated. He gets a new pen, tells me how wonderful it is, and has me try it. Then, he gifts me with one... but, I digress.

Something I'm discovering and loving about them for writing, is that they're forcing me to retrain my hands to release my death grip, when writing. It's easing the pain in my hand, from writing, and allowing me to write more often and much longer - and more beautifully. His writing has improved dramatically, too.

I suspect it would be difficult to get too many pens.  Each handle has its own feel and well,,nibs wear out, so it's important to have as many extra as one can find places to keep them.

It's timely that this thread popped back up today, because I'm currently simmering alder cones to make alder cone ink, and spent last night re-carving feather quills (I went to take a picture of said quills, but apparently I left them at school). It's hard knowing what size nib to carve! The all seem to write very thick lines (like 2cm), but carving the quill narrower is really quite tricky!

Hopefully my Medieval History students won't mind the large lines they make!

I may need to learn to make ink from you.  I will seek out alder cones in the yard.

As much as I adore this method of mark making, I'm not a huge fan of black ink.  I haven't had much luck with fountain pen ink in a dip pen (although this could be a paper problem and is worth trying again).  I really want brown ink for dip pens, but also am trying to restart my art-supply-no-buy.  

Is the alder ink water resistant?

The library has a book with many van gogh sketches, most of these are done with a reed pen he cut himself.  I think a feather might work well.  I want to try a few master copies to see if I can try these different marks.



A friend who does medieval calligraphy says the line width is easier to control with a feather if the paper is at least 20 degrees slanted, like on a drawing board.   She also holds her feather upside down by modern pen standards so there is more ink in the hollow of the feather, but I couldn't figure out how to make that work.

I like the pocket pens, for travel/ errands, etc, and keeping on me. But, Lamy makes a very affordable, durable normal sizes series, Safari, that we both enjoy as our go-to, at home. But, there are others, that we both enjoy, and some nibs that he loves - flex nibs. You might enjoy them for art, but for simply writing, I find myself going back to the death grip that hurts, so I'm not a fan.

Nicole, I was checking out your walnut ink thread, and thinking about trying it - I think I've completely missed the hulls, for this season, but the effects you achieved were beautiful! And, I've certainly had plenty of black walnut stains on my hands, as a kid, too remember how determined it is, to stay put. How does the alder cone ink compare to the walnut, please?

I found some ink making threads

https://permies.com/t/233417/art/Making-ink-alder-cones-black

https://permies.com/t/280554/art/Pokeweed-ink

https://permies.com/t/91087/permaculture-writing/art/Making-Ink-Writing

r ransom wrote:I may need to learn to make ink from you.  I will seek out alder cones in the yard.

As much as I adore this method of mark making, I'm not a huge fan of black ink.  I haven't had much luck with fountain pen ink in a dip pen (although this could be a paper problem and is worth trying again).  I really want brown ink for dip pens, but also am trying to restart my art-supply-no-buy.  

Is the alder ink water resistant?

I think, because it's made with gum arabic, that it's will bleed if wet. But, it is a stain. I'll try testing it tomorrow when my classes are all getting ink everywhere. I'm pretty sure I remember being able to blot it when it was still wet, kind of like water color.

I wonder if water resistant inks are made with gelatin? The Chinese ink sticks are made of gelatin and charcoal/lamp black. They seem to be more resistant to water because they're from gelatin, which really only gets soluble in warm water.  

r ransom wrote:A friend who does medieval calligraphy says the line width is easier to control with a feather if the paper is at least 20 degrees slanted, like on a drawing board.   She also holds her feather upside down by modern pen standards so there is more ink in the hollow of the feather, but I couldn't figure out how to make that work.

I actually noticed a lot of kids figuring this out, and it does work! The nib on a feather quill is not the same as a normal calligraphy nib, and the ink just happy flows down without much pressure. It makes the ink flow a little slower than we usually use our quills.

r ransom wrote:I may need to learn to make ink from you.  I will seek out alder cones in the yard.

As much as I adore this method of mark making, I'm not a huge fan of black ink.

I like brown ink much better than black, too. For most of my calligraphy, I use a Sheaffer fountain calligraphy pen (it's what I was given when I was a teenager, and it what I learned on), and I just bought a bunch of cartridges of brown ink to satisfy my need for brown!

I really like the brown of aldercone ink. It's warmer than than the walnut brown ink.

I ended up with a crazy amount of walnut ink/dye (some will be used for dying wool in my class in about a month), so I experimented with adding iron to it to make it blacker. I don't much care for the color, but it'll be fun chemistry to show the kids how the color can change by adding iron.

I first tried adding some rust from rusty nails/wire that I had in a jar. That did nothing. Then I saw this tutorial on making walnut ink, that just showed her opening an iron pill and pouring it in. I have iron pills! I tried opening one up and dumping it in, and it did indeed work! Fun chemistry!

I'll try to get pictures tomorrow when I have my quills and ink together. I really should figure out the right amount of gum arabic to dye/stain to get a good ink. I just kind of eye-balled it and then tested to see if it sort of flowed from the quill right compared to my store-bought Higgens ink.  

Went down a late-night rabbit hole and went outside, harvested bamboo, and carved them into reed pens. I was honestly amazed at how much ink they held. I'll get better pictures on Friday (have to work/teach tomorrow), but here's a scan of the writing I got out of one dip of a fresh bamboo "reed" pen, using Higgen's ink.

The bamboo pen looks amazing!

When van gogh discovered Rembrandt used reed pens, and vincent started cutting his own, he waxed poetic about how well suited reed pens are for drawing.   I wish we had a plant like that on my farm.

When I watched a video about cutting reed pens, they mentioned how Van Gogh liked them for drawing, and I thought of you!

Apparently, the reason we switched to quill pens is that they don't dull as fast as reed pens. At least that's what one of the videos I watched said (I'll try to add videos to this post when I come back from teaching).

My property came with this small, clumping bamboo. At first, I was rather worried it would take over, but it's been pretty contained and rather handy!

In my area, there's quite a few people who grow bamboo near to the road...and then it grows down to the road and the ditches. I wonder if there's anyone like that where you are, and you could just pull over to the side of the road and snag some bamboo for free.

I watched some videos and it looks like reed and bamboo are cut something like quills, so I might start there.  I have a few feathers that are over a year old, which I'm told will make them last longer than fresh feathers.  But I don't know if the moths got to them yet.

I hope to walk around the yard and see what materials present themselves for experiments.

Pictures time! After two classes of kids had a chance to play with the feather quills and reed pens, here's some take aways:

• Feather quills really don't hold much ink, especially not walnut and alder ink!
• Quite a few kids found they had much better control with the reed pen than with the feather quill. The ink flowed more consistently with it.
• The walnut and alder inks were not as well performing as the Higgens ink I have. They ran out a lot sooner. I'm not sure why. Maybe:
• Maybe I didn't put in enough gum arabic, or
• Maybe the containers were too shallow...but I wasn't going to set out really deep containers of ink for kindergarteners to use!
• Maybe there's other stuff added to the Higgen's ink?
• Lots of kids wanted to use a feather quill becausem well, it's a feather quill!
• Reed pens are much nicer for drawing, and less sensitive to the angle of writing.

I love the color of alder ink. It's much warmer than the walnut, but most of the kids preferred the black walnut ink because they liked it darker. Some kids chose alder because they knew someone allergic to walnuts and wanted to avoid tree nuts.

When you cut the bamboo for quills, cut in the middle of the segment, not near the nodes. The hollow section of the bamboo is really small/non-existent near the nodes. This is why some of my bamboo pens are shorter than others.

Cutting a pen from a feather is trickier than it looks.  It's that final slit where things seem to go wrong.  

Feather quill goes okay with the Manga ink.  On first try, it does better with the shellac ink winsor and newton makes.  Still, it needs a lot of practice.   Or,I could say, I will need plenty of practice to get comfortable with a feather quill.  But it does make the marks i seek.  That's promising.

My center slit is nearly always off-center. And, if I try to trim the other side to center it up, it usually slices through to the center cut and I have to start again.

I honestly wonder how necessary that center cut is...

I mentioned my winsor and newton ink is a problem at the last quarter.   The trapezoidal jar makes that last bit of ink difficult, and for some reason, the last quarter evaporates into dust in storage.  I suppose more effort to keep the neck of the bottle clean would help, but I suspect magic.  Nothing seems capable of restoring the dust to ink.

Well, yesterday I found the more recent bottle that I thought finished, had a goo in the bottom, not dust.  So I filled it half way with warm water and gave it a shake. Today, it's usable ask ink.  The theory is that as ink, it's water soluble, but as dry marks, it's not.

It's not quite as nice or as dark as a new bottle, but it is similar in texture.   It will do for exercises and mark making practice.

I have some very old bottles of ink that were my grandfather's. He used them to make scrimshaw on antlers. All of them have liquid in them, and some colors still work. But, some have the color settled to the bottom in a goo that can't be stirred in and used.

It's facinating to see which ones work and which don't. The Higgens black still works great. The Pelican light green works well, and so does the orange, yellow, and red. But, the deep green doesn't work at all.

My grandfather died when I was three, so back in 1988. I'm pretty sure these inks are from the 70s, if not 60s.

The two blue bottles on the bottom are empty, but I wanted to get a picture of them because it's cool to see the fancy glass bottles. While I was looking at them to find the names of the companies, I noticed the Skrip bottle had an interesting shape and like a bubble in it. And then I noticed its lid said, "Tighten cap. Tip bottle to fill the well." I thought this was rather confusing, but then I noticed there's ink residue toward the top of the bottle, not just the bottom. And, when I opened it up to see inside, there was a little....pocket?....bubble?....well?.... of glass that you could fill with ink. This would allow you to get a deep dip of ink, even when your bottle is low on ink. How cool is that!?!

I wonder if there's any companies today that do the same thing? I'm kind of doubting it, especially since the old Higgens ink is in a lovely glass bottle, while my new Higgens ink are in plastic bottles.

I went looking to see how Sheaffer's Skrip ink bottles have changed, and stumbled across this old add for them:



I went looking to see if Sheaffer Skrip bottles still have the little shelf/well, and watched some videos of people using them. I didn't spot the well in there.

I found this reddit that talks about the history of Skrip bottles:

Sheaffer marketed ink as "Skrip writing fluid! The successor to ink!" in the mid 1920's. Around 1934, they designed a bottle that had a wee inkwell / pocket built into the top inside of the bottle to make it easier to fill your pen, and be able to use every last drop of ink. These bottles & "skrip" (remember, it's not 'ink', it's *Skrip!*) were made both in Fort Madison, Iowa, USA; and Goderich, Ontario, Canada.

1980's -- Bottles had domed caps until the 1980's, then changed to flat caps.

1966 -- Textron acquires Sheaffer, changes logo from "SheafferS" to "Sheaffer"

1962 -- US zip codes started in 1963. Boxes/bottles without zip codes are pre-1962.

Boxes have been printed with prices 25¢ (1950's?), 29¢ (1960's?) and 39¢ (pre-1975?.) Likely other prices, just what I've found so far.

There are *also* same shaped ring-top bottles that do Not have the skrip-well. At a guess? from the 1980's or 1990's. I am *most* interested if anyone can date these.

All three of my vintage bottles I found at a local Senior Center art / jumble market for an embarrassingly cheap price. Both the Washable Blue (c. 1960) and the Jet Black (c. 1990) are in current use in my pen rotation.

The modern cone bottle? Pffft. 2018, boring Green, seals well, boring. Did I mention it's boring? But a very well behaved, solid, workman ink and non-tippy bottle. If boring. (The pens, BTW, are a Sheaffer Imperial Touchdown desk pen, and my grandfather's 1926 Sheaffer flattop.)

It looks like the new bottles don't have the little mini-ink well. Some people buy these bottles used so they can fill with the ink of their choice.

Reading the timeline posted in reddit, it seems like my bottle comes from before 1963, as neither it nor it's box have zip codes on them.

Thinking about these bottles reminded me of the first time I used my grandpa's inks...to make treasure maps for my preschoolers! Most of the colors worked, but not the deep green, which was the color I needed most for the slides and park bench!

Some good badic stuff on how to use dip pens.  Intro ends at about 5 min.



The things I enjoyed the most was the different way this person (mumma mushroom) has of communicating to me.  Although it makes me feel slightly old.