My calligraphy

I'm an enthusiastic, largely self-taught, amateur calligrapher. Some people like my work; I'm very aware of its shortcomings. This page introduces the styles I use.

I mostly write in gothic-based styles (such as Gothic itself, and a gothic-based handwriting).

But I can also do uncial, and a rather free uncial-based hand.

I can write in italic (which is faster than my old handwriting, and so is useful when taking notes) too, but don't particularly like it myself.

Computerized calligraphy

A while ago, I developed a family of PostScript fonts (unfortunately not complete -- little more than the lower-case letters and most of the capitals) based on my best Gothic hand. I used these to produce some artwork for a choir-book, and may do some further work on them in the future.

A little signwriting

After a discussion with a friend in which we agreed that with things one doesn't buy often (such as marmalade) it's worth paying for a good one, it was natural that when I bought a Land Rover it should be called ``Marmalade'', and I tried a little signwriting accordingly, choosing a rustic roman script.

Replacing my handwriting

A while ago I made a deliberate decision to write habitually in a better hand than my old one, and switched to a gothic-based script that I already used quite a bit. This is reasonably fast to write, reasonably regular, and reasonably compact.

At speed, this becomes yet another scruffy handwriting, although a somewhat unusual one. This sample is real notes I was taking on a course, written without any intention of using it as a scanned sample.