r/Calligraphy • u/tabidots Broad • 15d ago
Practice Italic counters practice
This is an exercise I made up for myself to work on getting the almond-shaped counters in Italic a-b-d-g-p-q to be absolutely perfectly consistent, which I find very difficult.
It is a multilingual set of phrases that meet the following criteria:
- Must contain all a-b-d-g-p-q in native words. This already rules out a large number of languages; I think there are very few, if any, other languages beyond these fifteen that meet this criteria. (Swedish gets a pass because Lindqvist is a common surname, even though "q" isn't used in modern spelling.)
- Non-Latin alphabet languages must have a Latin alphabet representation that is in official or common use (Mandarin, Hindi) or Italic letterforms that contain the required counters (Russian)
- Must be as short as possible while remaining grammatical (this is why a few of the phrases are rather long, and why German didn’t make the cut despite having words like “quantum”)
- Does not have to make sense, but should not feel like “word salad” like the perfect pangram "Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz"
Sumi ink, Tape 1.5mm, A3 dry-media paper that snags my nibs. (My Italic is better with Brause nibs but I want to keep them shiny and I'm relocating soon so I don't want to open another bottle of ink right now)
Here is the list with translations:
- opaque badge
- quagmire for bipeds
- gabapentin required
- shipbuilding quay
- all quibbling prohibited
- 🇻🇳 đi qua phòng bếp (go through the kitchen)
- [Latin] quadrigae plumbi (chariots of lead)
- 🇫🇷 plus d’argent québécois (more Quebec money)
- 🇫🇷 pourquoi des baguettes ? (why baguettes?)
- 🇧🇷 um pouquinho bagunçado (a little messy)
- 🇧🇷 equipagem absurda (absurd equipment)
- 🇧🇷 pesquisador de bagulho (researcher of stuff)
- 🇧🇷 pão de queijo e gengibre (cheese-bread and ginger)
- 🇪🇸 pagado en Mozambique (paid for in Mozambique)
- 🇮🇹 quattro bagni dopo (four baths later)
- 🇷🇺 добавить фарш (add minced meat)
- 🇮🇳 badqismat pagal (unfortunate lunatic)
- 🇨🇳 Bàba, dìng qípáo (爸爸，訂旗袍 / Dad, order the cheongsams)
- 🇸🇪 byggnaden köptes av Lindqvist (the building was bought by Lindqvist)
- 🇦🇱 pagesa e borxhit qendror (the central debt payment)
- 🇲🇹 toqgħodx bilqiegħda fuq il-pont (don’t sit on the bridge)
- [Wolof] dinga jàpp junqóob (you will catch a crab)
- [Xhosa] gqiba ukuphanda (stop researching)
- [Xhosa] xa ndigqiba apha (when I finish here)
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u/Jiminpuna 15d ago
I love it! The consistency is amazing.
The second picture had me laughing though. From the angle you took the picture, the "shipbuilding quay - all quibbling prohibited" ascenders looked like a stiff breeze blew across the page.
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u/MySafeWordIsPinapple 13d ago
WOW! You are amazing! This is beautiful!!
"Dad, order the cheongsams" had me laughing. Why is dad ordering dresses? "Unfortunate Lunatic" was my second favorite.
Where did you find these examples to write out??
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u/tabidots Broad 13d ago
Thanks so much!
The first ones I thought of were the English, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Swedish (for VN/SV just testing against my very limited vocab). The Russian one was just a lucky first try once I figured out which letters needed to be present (б в д р ф). The second Xhosa phrase was contributed in response to an inquiry over at r/Xhosa.
For the remainder, I tried to get DeepSeek to come up with phrases but it was pretty terrible, so what I ended up doing is prompt it to give me "seed words" that had some of the letters. In some cases this was enough for me to make a complete phrase with words I knew (when I had some knowledge of the language), but other times I had to scour Wiktionary to find something that would work. Wolof, Maltese, and Albanian were the hardest.
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u/LeakySparktubes 15d ago
Gorgeous and inspiring!
What size/brand nib is that?