Pens for Italic Hand Calligraphy

Video Transcript

"To begin, we're going to look at the different types of writing tools that you might use. You have a choice. Easiest, cheapest and most readily available, I hope, are calligraphy markers, which work like so. They have a broad nib and a skinny side. However, as with all things that are cheap and easy to find, the calligraphy nibs eventually soften over time and you're going to see that your hairlines get thicker and the edges of the nib get kind of squished down. So the alternative is to use a steel nibbed pen. And a steel nib pen is going to give you the beautiful broad lines, just make sure I don't have too much ink, and also beautiful hairlines and a little more control than the marker. So my recommendation is if you at all can, and sometimes people can't manage the pen, I would suggest starting out with a steel nib pen which is the historic tool for writing, for beautiful writing. The nibs come in a variety of sizes. Here I have a C0, which is a big one, and a C1, which is the next size down. You can see there's a little bit of difference there. What you want to avoid are the nibs that are pointed because pointed nibs, this nib is not the correct nib to use, will not do the proper writing technique that we're going to be working on. Now here's another one, a different brand of nib. This one comes from Japan, it's a tape nib. So to start I would say get a large nib and work with that, whether it's marker or steel nib."