You’ll use the same trick to form other Gothic letters later on. The 45-degree corners of the lines have meanwhile mysteriously met up to create a tidy, squared-off ‘c’ or ‘e’. Draw a slightly down-sloping bar across to the right. Keep the pen angle at a constant 45 degrees. Then take the nib off the paper, and reposition it at the top of the letter again so that the nib’s left corner just touches the vertical line’s top right corner. At the bottom of the letter, change nib direction to move diagonally right and upwards to make a short, thin ‘tail’. Before you get to the bottom, angle diagonally right, still drawing downwards. Make sure your nib is angled at 45 degrees. You see? You start the first vertical a little below what will be the final height of the letter. The diagonal shoulder should create just enough white space inside the letter to balance the black – between 1.5 and 2 nibwidths’ worth of white space, that’s all. The trick with ‘n’ and ‘u’ (and, later, ‘m’ and ‘w’) is to make sure that the joining diagonals at the top (‘n’) or bottom (‘u’) are only a tiny bit longer than the lozenge you start the ‘i’ with.
These are basically formed of two ‘i’s joined together and the join is … an exciting diagonal line! Enough lilili? On to the next Gothic letters: ‘n’ and ‘u’. There are not many practice words containing only the letters ‘i’ and ‘l’ but, still, I recommend that you write out the following. It’s best to do each letter a few times, trying to improve it a little each time. Relax your arm, straighten your back, loosen your grip (no white knuckles please), keep the nib light upon the page and try to move your whole hand and wrist to form the letters.
It will make your letters stiff and clumsy. Watch out for muscular tension and poor posture. The Gothic letter ‘l’ is exactly the same, but the first lozenge starts about 7 nib-widths up and the descending vertical is of course longer (and more prone to wobble). (The thin diagonal slash as a ‘dot’ above the ‘i’ is not always found in the medieval originals but is very useful indeed for making Gothic script more legible.) You will notice (I hope!) that a Gothic letter ‘i’ is made up essentially of three marks: a symmetrical lozenge at the top, a short vertical (a ‘minim’) and another symmetrical lozenge at the bottom, which has an optional small upwards tick on it if it’s the final letter in a word. Here's an illustration of what 4 nib-widths looks like if your nib is very thick (your own nibwidths and, therefore, your Gothic alphabet may well be smaller or larger): There are a couple of letters – d and t – that are in between 4.5 and 7 nib-widths high. A standard, fairly open version is written around 4.5 nib-widths high for the x-height (the height of the regular small letters such as x, e, c, a, o.) Allow another 2-2.5 nib-widths above the x-height and below the base-line for ascenders or descenders on letters such as b, h, g, p. Gothic alphabets can vary in density and spacing. Rule your top line accordingly, or just estimate and stick to it as well as you can. You should write your Gothic alphabet at a size which is in proportion to the thickness of your nib so that it shows a pleasing balance of black and white space. The wider your nib, the taller and larger your letters must be. I’m going to assume you’ve made yourself comfortable :-) And, of course, this page in clear sight. Strictly, you should be lined up squarely in front of the desk with all your materials in easy reach, feet flat on the floor, back straight and shoulders relaxed. Tissues or cloth, and water if you like, for wiping ink off the nib, fingers, etc. You could use a board propped against a dictionary.)Ģ.ğair quality paper (preferably lightly ruled).Ĥ. Check that you have:ġ.Ě clear desk-space (preferably on a sloping writing-desk, or a desk-easel. In case you want to know, it’s pronounced ‘LIT-era tex-choo-WAH-lis kwod-RAH-tuh’.įirst, set up your workspace and materials comfortably. (Even more prestigious was textualis prescissa or sine pedibus.) This is the second-highest grade of Gothic alphabet from the period. The ‘littera textualis’ means it’s letters for the main text (ie high-grade formal writing)- and ‘quadrata’ refers to the square, regular, ‘four-sided’ look of it. Its Sunday title is littera textualis quadrata. The particular style of Gothic alphabet I’ve laid out here is a formal hand that would have been used for copying the main text (ie not translations or footnotes) of high-quality books in Latin between 12. By the end, you should, I hope, know more about writing Gothic than when you started. If you do the whole tutorial thoroughly, there are at least a couple of hours’ fun to be had out of it. The above is not a particularly good or beautiful example, but it gives you an idea.
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