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Can’t stop writing with walnut ink. It’s the best 🙈🤍

I saw this in an antique mall. No nib. Just the Spencerian display case.

Pilot parallel pen
Some cheap brown paper from Action
Water colours from Ecoline

Silver Vulcion with 3.8mm Pilot Parallel Pen and Ecoline Watercolor.

Just play, have fun and move on! 😍🙏

Can’t stop writing with walnut ink. It’s the best 🙈🤍

My partner has always wanted to get into calligraphy, and her birthday is coming up! I’d love recommendations on pens and what else I should include in a starter bundle for her.

From my research so far, it seems like the Pilot Parallel Pen is a top choice, but I’m not sure which nib size (or colors) to get for a beginner. Should I start with one specific size (like 2.4mm or 3.0mm) or get a multi-pack?

Also, what else is essential for a complete gift set? (e.g., best practice paper/pads, specific inks).

P.S. I’m completely new to this world, so any advice helps!

Shaeffer calligraphy pen fitted with the 2.0mm nib, and loaded with Pilot Blue-Black ink.
Text taken from a quote from the Wolfman (1941).

i have a standard tachikawa nib holder and it works great for japanese nibs, but anything western seems to be very very loose and i struggle to keep them from falling out (i currently have 2 nibs lost in my ink bottles!!). has anyone else experienced this or got advice? i've had the holder for about 2-3 months now. this is all about the standard size tassel, not the smaller plume tassel ring.

I have never posted here, but I always were watching other calligraphies and awesome creations. Here are some of mine, I’ve been practising calligraphy for like 1,5 years on and off. I wonder what you think of it.

My first ever 100+ upvotes, THANK YOU EVERYONE!!

Play with the letter forms, be creative, but stay true to the script's character.

A gift for my sisters recent birthday. It is all drawn freehanded except for the guidelines and frames of each letter. I outlined the letters before filling them w Posca markers, my favorite medium.

I wanted to make something bright, vibrant, and colorful to match her personality🩷.

The process was fun and it was the perfect challenge.

Hey all, long time lurker, first time poster - recently I got a pilot parallel pen which I have been playing about with for a couple of weeks and having good fun/results, so I picked up these dip pens on Vinted for a few quid, I spent a few hours cleaning the dried up ink on the nibs as best I can with isopropyl, they are not perfectly clean, but about as good as I could get with my limited experience and at least they are steel coloured for the most part now (they were all caked in dried up black ink)

My question is - are these actually good useable dip pens, or are they more of a novelty item - I feel like the first few strokes are flooding the ink onto the page, and then it goes straight from too wet to being too dry.

Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to persevere with more thorough cleaning of the nibs, or is my ink just not good? I’ve used both watermans fountain pen ink (purple) and Windsor and newton fountain/dip pen ink (all other colours on this page).

P.s - I know that my hand is not steady or trained yet and have a lot of work to do on that before showing off any work - this is just a sheet of playing about with my new pens and no guidelines etc.

Thanks!!

8 1/5 x 11 India ink and watercolor on simulated parchment paper. The hand is my version of early Gothic. The x height is 3/16 of an inch. The first 2 lines are 1/4 inch x height. Speedball India ink. The red is done with Calli scarlet waterproof ink. The gold is Windsor and Newton (my favorite). Cobalt Blue and Vermillion Grumbacher watercolors for the illumination, with Daler Rowney pen white as highlights.

Still playing with proportions without switching to larger paper.

Soo i been looking into some xuan and washi papers (specially very light ones) and i came acostado that,maybe just maybe can try using parchment paper for practice since i dont wanna waste my 20 dollar washi paper notebook

Thoughts...?

Word of the day : https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/2026/10/26/

Pen : Pilot parallel 6mm

Ink : Parker Quink black

Paper : 200 GSM cold pressed watercolour paper

Just letters, ink and repetition.
What do you think? :)

Something that never occurred to me after all my years of looking at countless manuscript pages was how line endings in historic times were made to look so perfect. I have always been a stickler for spelling and basic grammar rules, and have always had in my mind the rule that you NEVER separated a word at the end of a line unless it was at a syllable, prefix or suffix point. Seeing manuscript pages use line fillers always justified an uneven edge that could be evened up with a design. And it is the reason my calligraphy pieces look so crappy, I think.

After some research, I am surprised and a bit embarrassed to admit that it never occurred to me that Medieval scribes split words anywhere - sometimes after a single letter, or with only a letter or two to go - to justify their line edges. They only used line fillers at the clear and definite end of a sentence.

Duh

Seeing so many examples of all of your work on this subreddit has caused me to try to better what I had always practiced and rethink a lot of what I do. So thank you.

Of course, things written in Latin had far greater wiggle room that things written in languages that you want easily read today. So I think that if I am going for pure artistic merit, or getting something as close to a Medieval piece as possible, I will start splitting words anywhere to justify the end of a line. But if I am going for both art and readability, I will stick to my line filler technique, as both have their merit.

Open for discussion on this, so please, let's hear your thoughts.