Carolingian Practice 1 low res

Carolingian Practice 1 low res
Originally uploaded by shellyinseattle

I'm learning a new hand, Carolingian, that was developed and popularized under Charlemagne the Great.

Here's my very first page of practicing.

Not that I can imagine people swiping this particular "piece", but copyright Shelly Baur 2009.

Tips for learning a new hand
Since many of you have fountain pens, you can learn to write with this font. Of course, any chisel-edge will do including markers.

1. Start off just trying to do basic marks with the correct pen angle. Note the squares in the upper left corner. Then the swooshes then the circles.

Carolingian mostly adheres to a 20 degree angle. So these practices help you get used to writing at 20 degrees, plus learn to make some of the basic lines/curves of the hand.

2. After you have the basic pen angle down, try to draw your lines at the writing angle. Carolingian tilts at a 5 degree angle from a straight line. You can see me start working on this with the line of l's I did.

3. Add in letters. My instructor believes starting with lettering "families" makes things easier in the beginning. So all the letters that are based on "o" like c and e are practiced, and so on.

4. Then add in words to get good spacing both between letters and between words.

5. I find that tracing a practice sheet using the same sized pen gives me the muscular coordination to do lettering much, much faster than if I try to duplicate a sheet from just looking at an exemplar. So, this example is done on good tracing paper.