Understanding handwritten letters

In the last chapter, I talked about handwritten letters, and how some forms…look like they were done with pen and ink.…I'm asking you to imagine how the shape of a pen nib combined with ink formed…the characteristics of a letter.…To help you visualize this better, we're going to take a quick break from fonts…while I show what I mean when I talk about pen-formed letters.…Now, I'm not a calligrapher;…I've only taken a couple of workshops to help me understand letters better,…so these letters won't be award-winning, but they'll do.…

I'm using a C1 nib, which is flat and has a slight angle.…The shape of the nib is what makes it a C nib.…The size of the nib is what makes it a C1 nib. A C2 would be a smaller, narrower nib.…I've marked out a template for my baseline, meanline, cap height, ascender, and descender.…Now, in this day and age, many of us have learned to draw forms in a…vector-based software.…When we do that, if we want to draw an O, for instance, we would draw the outer…edge, then the inside edge, then we'd fill in the shape in between.…