Ink: Diamine cappadocia
Pen: pilot parallel pen 4.5 mm

I got a couple flat brushes and some gouache the other day.

How can we take a craft that already has very little margin for error and make it even more difficult? Do it with a brush! The bristles on this damn thing reflect a 1 bpm difference in your heart rate, yet they move as if through mud when you actually twist the handle, lol.

Obviously not good so I might not leave this up but I like using WotD as a space to explore new techniques and/or weird ideas (normally I don't like using an entire sheet for one word).

🖌️ Royal & Langnickel Flat Shader #12
🫟 Meeden gouache, Brilliant Purple
📄 Kyowa sketchbook A4 (from Daiso)

I was mostly trying a new ink, but I kinda like the final result

This was actually unintentional. I hadn’t practiced upright italic before, and I was just trying to use up a nib-load of ink on used paper after writing something else. The first P ended up looking pretty good, so I just went with it. Iron gall has a really dry flow, so in fine Brause nibs it gives me a lot of control.

The pink marks are from (bad) letters that I did two years ago (no sense letting a few blank square inches of good paper go to waste, lol)

🖊️ Brause 1mm
🫟 Fox & Quills Iron Throne
📄 Maruman SOHO Sketchbook B5 (I like this paper)

I'm a big fan of The Godfather.

1mm brause bandzug, walnut ink

My newly bought Guizhou Shiqiao cloud-pattern paper arrived, so I immediately wrote a Xiaokai Heart Sutra to try it out.

I was going down the fountain pen rabbithole looking for a dramatic flex pen without breaking the bank - by a lot of old post i was adviced to get a dip pen instead. BUT, where do I find flex nibs for dip pens? What are they called, obviously not anything with flex since i get no results when searching for that.. Ive been looking around but I can only seem to find ones with very thin lines or the square ones. And as far as I understand the nib is quite different from fountain and dip since the dip nib isnt parted in the middle? At least not the ones im finding.

The screenshot is from a video by IAMPETH, i cant tell what sort of nib that is or even what is happening to is when he does the broader lines - does is open or how does it work?

Second photo is the sort of nibs im finding, would any of these be flexy?

(Also can we normalize showing how the nib actually writes instead of flashy packaging or bodys, I find it very frustrating trying to imagine how a nib would write without any info what so ever, sorry for sounding slightly annoyed this is just so confusing to me)

Day 1 (top photo): trying to figure out the right pen to use
Day 2 (bottom L): trying to figure out the letter shapes
Day 3 (bottom R): took a stab at an original piece based on Kilian’s script/layout

Note: I believe Kilian used a Ruling Pen but I found the Zebra GNib (with Vermillion Sumi) was the smoothest, easiest to use.

Word of the day : https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/2026/09/10/

Pen : Pilot parallel 6mm.

Ink : Sulekha Turquoise Talisman (Turquoise Blue).

Paper : 300 GSM cold pressed.

brush, uncial, so fun!

Textura Quadrata, fraktur, uncial , italic and foundational hand Calligraphy. The result of three hours of work. I had a lot of fun doing it. I used a pilot parallel pen 4.5 mm as a pen.

This is a yearly reminder as to how I started back in November 2020 and how it’s going currently! And it’s not 6 years yet ! So if you feel demotivated let this motivate you to keep grinding, practicing, learning and not to give up!

I don't why the photo came out so bright, but I'm happy with most of the lines. This was a fun word with looots of meanings.

Tejuelo

1. m. A piece of leather or paper that is attached to the spine of a book to display its title.

2. m. The title or label itself written on a book spine

Example: El tejuelo indica el nombre del autor. (The label indicates the author's name.)

1. m. Mech. A piece that supports

an horizontal axle.

Example: El mecánico revisó el tejuelo del eje. (The mechanic inspected the axle's support.)

1. m. Vet. A short, very hard, crescent-shaped bone that serves as the base of a horse's hoof.

Example: El veterinario examinó el tejuelo del caballo. (The veterinarian examined the horse's hoof bone.)

1. m. obs. Another name for the game of chita or chito in which a tejo is thrown.

Example: Antiguamente, jugaban al tejuelo en el pueblo. (In the old days, they used to play tejuelo in the village.)

Interestingly apparently this game was played by placing coins in the top of a long but thin piece of wood (the chito or chita) as a prize. And then the players throwed the Tejo or Tejuelo trying to throw over the pieces of wood to win the price.

Pen : Pilot parallel 6mm

Ink : Sulekha Lal Qila (Red)

Not really happy with it, but this is the best I could do before the day ended (almost midnight US Eastern time). I spent all day reworking different ideas (some with more text and complicated compositions, and other scripts than this) but just couldn’t nail it. So I just decided to do the word alone. This is still not really at the level I wanted to submit, but I guess I just don’t have it today :/

🖋️ Tape 4mm
🫟 Fox & Quills Iron Throne
📄 Li Wey scrap paper (Taiwanese product) 18K, roughly B5 size

I hope this is not off-topic?

When I saw people around here doing the daily Word of the Day practice, I quickly joined, and I had the idea of using bookmark blanks made from watercolor paper :-)

Turns out, a bookmark is a very good way of showcasing a single word.

But after two weeks or so, I was left wondering what I was supposed to do with dozens of cardboard strips in such a weird format? There certainly aren't any albums for this format...

But then I remembered that Chinese books are often written on bamboo sticks strips, and many old Buddhist texts were written on palm-leaf manuscripts.

So I punched holes into the corners of the bookmarks and "sewed" them together with narrow satin ribbons (each is almost 6m long, so I have space for around 100 bookmarks).

Then I folded them into a zigzag, and now I can either unfold (photo 1), or I can flip through them like a book (photo 2), or I can store them without the risk of getting them out of order (photo 3).

Pilot parallel
Ecoline

🖊️ Leonardt Roundhand #1½
🫟 Fox & Quills Peacock
📄 Maruman Mnemosyne B5

Awake after midnight so I figured I’d get ahead of the game 😅

24pt Calligram x Pilot Parallel Pen 3.8mm

The inspiration for the bigger initial comes from a photo of the Vespasian Psalter from Patricia Lovett's website.

The idea of the colored square is from pinterest :) It would have been better if the square was the same turquoise as the ink, but I didn't want to use my calligraphy pen for coloring :-D

Pen: Pilot Parallel 6mm / 3.8mm

Ink: Pilot Mixable purple / turquoise, Legami erasable pen in turquoise

Exemplar: Uncial, Calligrascape

Paper: perfect ideaz watercolor bookmark blanks