Calligraphy Preparations


Now that you have the necessary equipment, it's time to start practising. First of all, you must prepare a writing surface on the paper. For this you need a sheet of common typewriter or drawing paper, a ruler and a pencil. The document can be oriented in two different ways: "vertical" or "horizontal". (Some people call it "portrait" and "landscape", respectively.) Most documents in the middle ages were horizontal, but we are going to do it vertical since this is what most of us are used to.

Margins

We begin by doing the margins. For practise purposes we can take a shortcut: using the breadth of the ruler (rulers are usually around 2 inches broad or a little less). Put the ruler on the paper so that one of its sides lies along one of the longer edges of the paper. Draw a thin pencil line along the other side of the ruler. You now have a margin which is as broad as your ruler - simple and fast because you don't need to measure anything.

Repeat the process on the other long edge of the paper, and at the top. The margins we are making here are only a text field, for writing in. When making an actual document, you will have illuminations as well, and these don't have to stay strictly within a rectangular field, as long as you leave enough space along the edges to allow for framing. Thus, the text field on a real scroll will probably be smaller than this one, to leave room for ornaments.

Line spacing

Now you have to decide what line spacing you want. This depends on how big your characters are - and several other things. The broader your pen, the bigger your characters will be. There is an ideal character size for every nib, but you can increase or decrease it about 15% and still make good-looking letters. When you have made up your mind about the character size, you have a minimum line spacing which is equal to the height of the tallest characters plus a fraction of an inch, so the lines of text don't overlap.

Writing with the absolute minimum line spacing will produce a text that appears tightly crammed into the writing surface. This is certainly medieval since they often did that to save parchment. But if you increase the line spacing, the document will be easier to read. It's really a matter of taste. Some scribes use very wide line spacing to provide room for flourishes or just to produce a more "airy" look, or to fill up the surface when there is little text.

There is an infinite number of variations to these factors. How much text is there? You can vary this by choosing longer or shorter wordings. How large is the document? How much space will you set aside for illuminations? Do you like the letters tightly packed or thinly spread? Which nib do you prefer? Look at medieval samples to see the right proportions. It's much easier than trying to develop some sort of mathematical formula for nib width/ letter size/line spacing ratios. I prefer writing over measuring and calculating, don't you?

But for the purpose of practise, we will use the 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) nib and a line spacing of 3/4 inch (ca 19 mm). This will give us pretty much space. Start at the top margin and put little pencil dots along both long margins this distance apart. Connect the dots opposite each other, and you will have writing lines. Don't press too hard, you are going to erase all pencil lines later. And don't fill the whole page with lines - there should always be space at the bottom.

You also need guiding lines which tell you the height of the low letters. In this case, the guiding lines should be 1/4 inch (6 mm) above each writing line. Mark up with dots like the writing lines. If you have a transparent ruler with scales at 90 degree angle to the drawing edge, you can get off with less work. You don't need to make little dots along the side margins for writing lines or guiding lines, and then connect these. Instead, you simply turn the paper so the top margin is closest to your body, start from the top margin and use the angled scales to measure out the lines, proceeding each time from the previous line.

Do the writing lines first, then turn the paper 180 degrees, begin at the bottom line and do the guiding lines.