Here is the finished copy of the page I’ve been obsessing over in the last few days! It’s page 11 from The Universal Penman, a letter from Joseph Champion to George Bickham, August 8, 1733. I just wrote the actual letter, not the excessively flourished header, date and signature. I tried to copy every detail, every ligature, letter form and flourish as accurate as possible (without penciling first – I just used a line grid). As mentioned in one of my previous posts on Insta, the size is a bit bigger than in the book – I scaled the x-height up from 2 mm (1/12 inches) to 3 mm (1/8 inches).
My lines tended to get a bit wider proportionally than in Champion’s original – so I had to cheat a little and invent some more flourishes for the line-fillers between the second and third paragraph ;).
There are of course some bloopers. I am not happy with the T that starts the second paragraph – the swashes aren’t as nicely balanced as in the original. The exit flourish of the capital N in the same line should be higher to balance the other flourishes in this area. There are some bigger words within the text that are written in Round Hand (‘New Copy Book’ and ‘Mr. Charles Snell‘) that I had difficulties with – switching from the narrower, lighter and shorter Running Hand style to the bolder Round Hand proved challenging.
There are some more – but overall I am quite happy with the outcome of this practice / study and look forward to write some texts without an original to copy!
