Teaching Yourself Beautiful Cursive Handwriting (French Style Preferrably)

[InSilicoVeritas]

Hi Chris,

 

I would be happy to write it up for you.

 

As a genuine Frenchman ( ), who was teached from 2nd grade to write with a fountain pen and never abandon it, I think my handwriting is pretty representative of the "la ronde" font teached in french schools, but which has morphed in a more slanted, elegant, "adult-like" style.

 

However if what you want is a more "old school", calligraphy-like font, I might not be the best person for write it up for you.

 

Let me know. Maybe you can send me samples of the font you are looking for.

[GreenMountain]

I learned to write in a little French one room school with chalk boards, pencils, dip pens (purple ink). We had little leather satchels like brief cases and in them we carried the cheap little French-ruled stapled notebooks, a pen case with our pens and pencils, our chalk board, and a little plastic round case for the sponge used to erase our chalk boards, and our books. Chalk, white only for children, came in cardboard boxes. On the last day of the school year the teacher would give out the last bits of her colored chalk...wonderful.

There were two types of pens: small ones with round holes in the ends where one put the pointed end of the quill in when not in use,(turned it around to use), and the more expensive pens that had a lever that gripped the semi-circular end of a quill. The quills for the larger pens were kept in little plastic boxes...wonderful to have an assortment of different quills. I think only the rich kids had the larger pens. No one had fountain pens.

Two really exciting assignments were to fill the inkwells (I don't recall how we kept the ink from drying out...anyone know?), and erasing the teacher's writing on the board (assigned only to favored or "good" students).

We started learning to write on chalk boards and the french ruled paper in ink, writing the same letter over and over again across the page, so many lines for each letter aaaaaaaa bbbbbbb and then combinations of letters such as elelelelel or arararar etc. My recollection is a little hazy, but I don't recall writing upright, just slanted.

Unfortunately I was not in the French school system long enough to retain my French handwriting, although I still write x'es with a backward c and a forward c, and cross my 7's.

One of these days I'm going to start up practicing my handwriting again. I tried using the little dip pens recently. They have wonderful flex, and are very scratchy! One needs an ink well with a shallow ink reservoir I recently bought an old Shaeffer bottle, hoping that that the little short well inside the bottle will work. Haven't tried it yet.

[txomsy]

In this post you can find a link to a site with links to calligraphy/writing books from a number of countries over the ages, most of which (if not all) are free to download for the common good. You'll find texts on French hands (the various ones) to your heart content.

 

As for the political considerations, they are better left off the forum. If anything I've learned is that anything you say has been attributed to either "side" at one time or another, and promoted by either side at some time.

 

And learning to write is a matter of teacher and disciple, where the teacher may be only indirectly present (through a book, that is what writing was invented for), and where the teacher may be good, bad or average, but that's specific to each teacher. That is why you can find so many books linked in the site above. Not because of political times made worst teachers, but because there are so many things and ways to teach --and learn.

 

I bet that, if you ask, there will be forum members from any country, age and belief system that will tell horror and love stories from their teachers. Ascribing specific traits to specific collectives does you no good and projects an unfortunate image of one self.

 

So, check out those books, they are freely available, see which one explains the subject matter closer to your tastes, whether it be with detailed verbose descriptions, with samples to imitate, with ductus, with geometry, flourishes, etc... and practice it.

 

You are most likely to spend quite a lot of time browsing through them until you find the one that is for you, 'cos making a single recommendation would be as bad as having a teacher making for you the decision on which script to learn.

[seaclanky]

Hello NOS

I'll add my two pennorth....

I too am a born-again Fountain Penner. Got a lovely new Schaeffer from Santa some years ago. Decided that a nice pen deserved a nice "Hand" and so I ended up searching the Web for examples of good handwriting. It's all out there of course but I had to put a fair few evenings in researching before deciding on the "look" that I wanted. Eventually settled on the Copperplate style (yes I know that Copperplate is not strictly a handwriting) because I just liked the look of it.

I wanted to get my letter forms sorted so that I could carry the same style across whether using ballpoints, FP's or dip pens or pencils etc. I wanted a little line width variation too. And that is where things got complicated. Of course with a pointed dip pen any pressure applied needs to be on the down stroke, to avoid digging in. Then if you're doing Cursive that implies a minimum of pen lifts. So that led me to find a way to produce letters with line variation, no lifts, but still retain the look and feel that I wanted. I ended up spending many evenings practicing, trying out new forms and so on. Eventually got a working solution that worked with my self-inflicted rules. Then realised that what I ended up with as my new improved hand bore little resemblance to the copy books that I had referred to in the first place.

The moral I took from that was that there was no easy way to get an improved hand. However I had a lot of fun playing with pen and paper when I would just have been in the pub. I now have a hand that I like; although I do reserve the right to change it as the muse takes me.

So I'd like to encourage you to have fun developing your skillset. Your handwriting should be to your own taste; you are the person that is going to get the pleasure.

Also, it won't be expensive, well maybe a few hundred quid on shiny pens, new inks, papers etc. All perfectly justifiable of course.

Have fun,

Graeme.

[GreenMountain]

When I was 6 y.o. I was taught to write using this alphabet. We used dip pens and nibs to write, and we were punished if our notebooks had ink stains... I have reproduced the alphabet as I remember it. It was upright, no slant was allowed. This has been written using a Perry nib and J.Herbin ink on the same type of notebook still in use in the first year of the Italian elementary school.

http://imageshack.com/a/img745/5407/Z2L7mB.jpg

Hi Sangrisano, would you please publish your image? I would like to see it and can't.

Thanks!

[pmitc34947]

Visiting France multiple times over the last thirty years, one thing that always stood out were the hand-written menus many restaurants display on the street. They have that similar, exceptionally beautiful style that one might be hard-pressed to find here in the United States. American restaurants would probably have a printed copy of their menu on display, if anything... but in France those menus are on display with that most beautiful hand. I think that is a bit of a national treasure.