InkVista

The pen may not always be the reason a line looks jagged or inconsistent. A brush pen may catch in a paper fiber and drag or pull, a nib may skip over the rough edges… 

Before the pen even touches the page, the guideline sheet can look forbidding: baseline, x-height, ascender space, sometimes a slant line running all the way through. But these lines aren’t designed to trap calligraphy into… 

The reason why thin upstrokes and thick downstrokes seem awkward is because this requires your hand to produce two different actions for the same letter. When the pen moves upwards, you must press lightly, yet… 

At first glance, a page of calligraphy looks complex. There are full words, long sweeping loops, and fancy flourishes, all in one place. But an easier way to look at things is much smaller: the…