quill pen – Page 2 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Pen in Hand

I am a firm believer that handwriting and its practice is important for a lot of reasons. It is an excellent way to learn fine motor control. It has been shown to improve thinking skills in children. You do it with a pen – no need for a computer – paper, too. Writing implements and paper run from super cheap – hey, steal that pen you use at the office! – as is paper – to crazy expensive.

Jake Weidmann’s Ted Talk is worth the watch – so many reasons presented as to why penmanship and writing are so important. There is history, there is pleasure, there is beauty, there is – there is – there is.

And then, yesterday, for whatever reason, I came across a 7-day course on learning Secretary Hand, the hand of scriveners, scribes, clerks, and everyday people who needed to write things down 500 years ago. I began today..I thought I would write down my thoughts about it using my homemade iron gall ink and a genuine, hand cut quill. Read it if you want some more information. The recipe I used to make my own ink is here – and it is still fine a year later!

This is my first exercise, with notes to myself as to how various letters were made in the 1600s as opposed to in the 2000s. Back then, the alphabet consisted of 24 letters, not our 26. I and J were interchangeable, as were U and V. There are different ways to make various letters, such as the S, depending on the letter’s location within a word. H can be made in the way we recognize it today, or in a form of shorthand that lends itself to quicker, more casual cursive.

And finally, here is a sample of my alphabet in cursive. The top sample is using my homemade ink and using a dip pen nib from the 1800s along with my nib holder from the same era. The bottom sample is with the same ink but with a quill pen.

My own lessons in cursive began in third grade. The style we learned was very typical for American school children, based on the Palmer Method of handwriting, the goal of which was a clean, functional, and easy-to-read handwriting. I’ve changed a few of the letters around, to suit my taste, such as the capital A, M, N and Q – they are based upon the letters in the Spencerian alphabet. Additionally, they lend themselves more readily to writing with a dip pen, fountain pen, or quill in my opinion.

Cursive is designed for speed in writing. As someone who taught for several years, I find it appalling that kids today say, “I can’t read your handwriting,” meaning cursive. They print. Sometimes they are told they have to print since their cursive is abominable, and a computer and keyboard and printer are not available.

So, Secretary Hand will continue to be practiced. It’s fun to learn something new, as well as by learning how to write it, I will actually be able to read documents from the early modern times of the 1500s-1600s! Sounds pretty cool to me.

More to come!

Documentation

Over the past week, I have been fermenting iron gall ink. Today I decanted the mixture, and here is my first attempt using it. I used a quill pen I cut from a turkey feather, and a dip pen using a flex nib. The paper is a Clairefontaine notebook with very smooth paper.

I am documenting this historical moment with some documentation . . .

Iron Gall Ink – A Quick Update

I spent most of the day dyeing with indigo on yarn . . . and some silk. A long day! But, on the list of things to do was to decant the iron gall ink I have been making over the past week.

Success! It is a really beautiful ink! It flows well off the flex dip pen nib as well as the quill I cut a few days ago. I’ll blog a bit more about it later, as at the end of a long day, I’m really tired, but really content with both the dyeing and the ink.

Sketching with Iron Gall Ink and Watercolor

Long before we had metal dip pens, artists drew with reed pens and with quills cut from the pinion feathers of a swan, turkey, or goose. If you look at the ink sketches of artists such as Rembrandt or DaVinci, you will see some very common characteristics. The ink lines vary in width – narrow, wide. Often the ink is brown, and so those not in the know think that brown ink was a thing way back when. In reality, it is the degradation of iron gall ink (aka oak gall ink) through time. When initially laid down, it was black. With time, it turns brown, and with a lot of time and depending on its degree of acidity, the iron gall ink can destroy the paper and drawing.

Over the past week, I have been playing with iron gall ink and a quill pen I cut from a turkey feather. I have some homemade iron gall ink nearly done – come Thursday, it will be ostensibly ready to use. Today, because I am finally at a point where I have time to play, I drew with iron gall ink and my quill, and then applied watercolors. The ink took its sweet time drying, and I didn’t blow dry it, but let it air dry or blotted it to see what would happen. As it is a damp day, it took awhile. Anyway, the following three pictures were first done with the ink, dried, and then painted in with watercolor. If you look at the pen strokes, you will see variations. I’ve never drawn with a quill before, so it was a new experience, one quite different than with a dip pen or fountain pen.

The kumquats were the very first drawings I did with the quill and ink. I had to really think about textures. You see, when you use iron gall ink, it begins as a light grey, but as it is exposed to the air, it becomes darker and darker until it is black. This made values a challenge!

Here, the ink in the picture was not quite dry, and some bled into the watercolors as I lay them down.

For the melons, the ink was taking forever to dry! I decided to see what would happen if I blotted the ink. The result was smudges, which you can see throughout the picture.

This final set was done with a sketchy watercolor. No thought was really given to composition or to color as I wanted to use the ink to express outlines, shapes, and shadows.

Altogether, this was a lot of fun, and for me there is a potential I hadn’t really thought about in getting a sense of history by using historical tools – quills, iron gall ink – that were once the best technology had to offer. I wonder what Rembrandt and DaVinci would think about paints in a tube, rather than the task of purchasing, grinding, and creating their own paints . . . perhaps they made their own quills and inks, too.

The Art of the Written Word

This past week or so has found me wandering into another element of water-based media: Ink.

Ink is used in drawing, but it is also used in writing, whether using the Roman alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, or any other form of an alphabet for any one of the myriad of languages found throughout the world.

Making ink is an art, and that means knowing something of chemistry (no matter how simple) and permanency. Ink is black and ink is colored – as are paints. This past week has found me suddenly distracted by the making of iron gall ink, also known as oak gall ink, and cutting quills from feathers. You can read about my adventures here, here and here for starters. You can return to Ink, Yarn, and Beer for more updates, too, if you want.

Consequently, I have not had much time to paint or draw as I have been spending a lot of time reading about ink and quills in particular, as well as watching videos on the same. This morning, I came across one which rather blew me away as it is global in nature, but local in artistry. Huh – what does that mean? Take 30 minutes of time to be quiet and to watch . . .