Pick your champion. These are my three favorite pens below a small writing sample. Which do you like the most?

The top one is a Waterman 52 with a flexible italic nib. This particular pen was purchased in 1899 and is 121 years old!

The middle pen is a new Pilot Custom 912 with FA nib and hand modified, the nib was ground to a needlepoint and extra flex was added.

The last one is a franken pen I built. It has a flexible nib from another Waterman 52, this one made in 1910 and has an extra fine point. I added to the body of a modern TWSBI Diamond replacing both the nib and the feed. I am using an ebonite feed so it has no trouble keeping up.

@freemo damn, difficult choice - they all look so pretty! Maybe number one... I wish my penmanship was that beautiful, I have s cheap one of those, but I write on it incorrectly
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@BoxerTheDog
My penmanship isnt always that nice. But if i keep practicing im getting there. Thanks though.

One is really nice for its history, but being a broad italic nib it can be tricky tonuse with many styles, especially copperplate.

@freemo how does one practice it? granted I've not really liked into it - to me it looks like I hold the pen in a similar fashion, but the letters that come out are completely different

@BoxerTheDog Well that depends. There are books that take you step by step through the process including practice sheets where you start by trying to replicate basic shapes and as you master each part you move on to combining them in different ways or introducing new skills. If you want to be a proper scribe who can replicate scripts nearly perfectly then this is the way they recommend you learn.

For me, I'm not really going for that level of perfection. As long as I see my handwriting get cleaner and prettier over time I am happy with my progress. Typically as I write I can see my errors, they stand out on the page. I also tend to write with an exemplar in front of me if I'm practicing that has a nice zoomed in demonstration of the ideal letter forms of a particular script.. I just just practice the same letters over and over again each time trying to improve on the mistakes of the last one. Over time you improve.

Usually in my writing I have specific letters in specific scripts that dont quite look right (for example my upper case B in copperplate right now). I will often just pick the letter I struggle the most with and focus on that for an hour sometimes.

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