13
votes
Fountain pens
My friend gave me a fountain pen, along with some ink and paper for it. Can someone who is into fountain pens give me advice to help me fully appreciate the gift?
My friend gave me a fountain pen, along with some ink and paper for it. Can someone who is into fountain pens give me advice to help me fully appreciate the gift?
Okay, so first of all: Which fountain pen is it? Which make? What do you want to do with it? Just daily notes?
Exactly. Depending on the type of nib, the filling mechanism, and the brand, you might need to fiddle with it more, or spend more time getting used to it. If you don't know the make/model, OP, share a picture.
Yes. OP please tell us the brand, the nib size, etc and best share a picture and we might help you out with how to hold it, etc.
Fountain pens are amazing. But if you are used to ballpens they will feel awkward. But everything other than fountain pens is not writing in the sense of "i could do this for hours".
Here's a picture of the pen. It says "Noodlers Ink." I assume that's the brand. I can ask my friend about the model if you want.
And here are pictures of the nib:
This is the pen you got. Noodler's Ahab was the first pen that I got and still have. It's really fun to write with, though you do have to learn that flexible nib fountain pens write differently from regular pens. The line differentiation is what really made me fall in love.
One of my favorite pictures from when I started here
Interesting. Can you explain the difference in types of nib? I've noticed that when I apply pressure, the nib "spreads" into three parts. Is that what you mean?
Exactly. When you naturally apply pressure on the downstroke, the nib will seperate and you'll get the typical look of a fountain pen word. The nib you have is called a "music" nib because it was traditionally used for writing notes on music bars, it's seperation into three distinct tips made it easier to make a heavy mark for the note head.
Traditionally music nibs weren't supposed to be flexible. The three tines were a matter of necessity, needing not one but two slits to get enough ink to the extremely broad point. They're also not meant to be held in the usual writing grip either, but that's another matter...
How flexible the Noodler's "music" nib is, IDK, as I don't have one. The point profile is certainly all wrong for a real music nib, anyway. But "three-tined semiflex nibs" probably don't sell as well.
I will share a few pictures here because I don't know what type it is.
I don't have specific intentions.
I think it depends on the person, but I get the most from writing while putting little to no pressure on the paper, just gliding the nib across the paper and getting full lines from it feels great to me.
You should check out Brian Goulet's youtube channel, it's a great place for starters (some argue that his store has overpriced products, but no one argues that his videos are great for beginners).
Thanks for the link!
You need to be mindful that you're writing properly to really appreciate fountain pens. The key is to write with your arm, not just your hand. That's how you get a really fluid, consistent script. I don't know why this isn't emphasized more when we're taught to write in school.
Because we're barely taught the bare minimum of handwriting in school, since it's not on the standardized tests?
I was actually reading something about this recently, in a government guide for teaching wounded soldiers in WWI. A lot of convalescents were functionally illiterate, and Uncle Sam decided that correcting that was a profitable, low-cost, low-impact way of keeping them occupied. They said - and I paraphrase heavily here - that while writing with arm movement alone had been demonstrated to be superior, it took substantially more time both to learn, and to produce appreciable results, because a significant portion of the instruction and practice time was devoted to abstract movement drills, rather than letters. While letting people write with finger movement was pedagogically inferior, people showed improvement, and reached a point of adequate legibility, much more quickly.
Also, I was curious and did some Googling, and a century ago, public-school students in the US apparently received about sixty hours of handwriting instruction per year, every year from the fourth grade onward. (With additional education later, if you went to a business college.) And a lot of teachers seemed to think that was woefully inadequate, and needed to be doubled or trebled.
I went to school in the '80s, and I don't remember any handwriting instruction after the first year we learned cursive, which was IIRC 4th grade. I can only imagine how bad things are today.
Also, interestingly, educators of the day were absolutely adamant that students be taught cursive handwriting with (dip) pens, not pencils, saying that the force required to get a dark, legible mark on cheap paper with a pencil taught bad habits that would later require extensive effort to correct. What did I learn to write with? Number 2 pencil on the shittiest, coarsest paper known to mankind, naturally.
I am very much a finger-draw-er, not a full-arm writer. It's a hard habit to break after this many years of it making do, and my writing can be pretty nice, but it's never been consistent. I get the feeling that learning how to properly write would take years of commitment, and likely more daily hours than my full-time job.
I'm also a finger-draw-er, and I've never really had a problem with it. I've never heard of writing with my full arm, and I just gave it a shot. It's feels so foreign. My letters look wider, but they're not any less legible. It's almost like someone else wrote it, which is bizarre, lol.
I'm told it's supposed to get better as you train your arm muscles more, specifically your shoulder muscles at being what controls the forming of the letters. I've only gotten marginally better at learning how to use my elbow more, but my fingers still do most of the work.
It's supposed to be better for you because it reduces the muscle and wrist fatigue from using your fingers to write... but I always default back to it anyway, because it's just what I already know.
It's not really supposed to be writing with the full arm. The proper form is (generally, some folks vary) that your arm rests on the desk/table on the muscles in your forearm, just forward of your elbow. And then you mostly write with forearm movement, with your fingers motionless, just holding the pen. At least, that's the way it was explained to me.
I've tried to write that way a few times and it always looks really weird. But I haven't spent months practicing it, either. Some of the old texts, you'd spend weeks just drawing lines and ovals, to get the muscle memory, I guess, down. (And speed. I saw a penmanship exercise that was drawing ovals with the pen, two lines high, that said to aim for two-hundred ovals per minute, or more, to develop rhythm...)
Interesting! I'll have to try this.
My favorite part of getting into fountain pens was the myriad of inks and colors I could play with. There are sampler packs that you can get to try out a ton of different colors and brands of ink that you should take advantage of. Depending on the pen, it might come with a reservoir, you might need to buy one, or you'll have to use available cartridges. In either case, have fun and play around with it to see how it fits your use case.
I ended up having a couple year facination that I have since gotten over but I still love to dabble in it every once in a while. I don't use pens on a daily basis so my use case never really let me get too obsessed with it. A friend of mine who originally inspired me, journals every day so for him it's great fun even to this day.
My pen has a reservoir, and my friend gave me some brown ink to start.
I could go broke experimenting with the multitude of beautiful iroshizuku inks.
Another important note about fountain pens is that you do have to keep the nib at the proper angle when contacting with paper, else it'll start scratching. You'll notice the tines separating and the ink starts skipping if you have it at a bad angle. It took me a lot of practice after only knowing ball-points and pencils for most of my life.
Good point. I noticed this when I was playing around with it.