Soon it will be more than necessary to move it all to a work in progress thread but I'm a bit unsure where to start it.
I was referring to pen without any technical detail, as that comes into mind when speaking of lettering.
However, felt tip pens -markers- could leave same patterns on the paper as a bunch of hair of a brush.
I'm trying to capture an ideal case, where that "pen shape" is just translated along the path, without any rotation or scaling,
with even paint/ink left behind.
With the original image, the red and green edges would serve as individual tips next to eachother.
As their shape is the same after translating or rotating, it is more trivial that if the "pen shape" is made out of those two, then it would look as depicted.
Then I thought, that is not really necessary, rather confusing to picture that way.
That is the main reason for remaking it, to add a more "natural" look.
Ball point pen would never come to my mind for calligraphy.
I was looking around how serif lettering become as we know today.
Could trace at least Alberti's "B", the others seems a bit mixed up.
BUT there is one essential work, next to the mentioned Gerrit Noordzij book,
which is
the origin of the serif by Edward M. Catich.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
1) The Imperial stone letterer was the craft brother of today?s sign-writer;
2) The instrumental cause of Roman stonecut letters was the flat, square-edged brush;
3) A master sign-writer manipulating such a brush wrote the inscription directly on stone then chiseled what he had written;
4) ?double line? layout, as some contend, was not used, that is, letters were not outlined then filled in;
5) Serifs and stroke endings are not the product of chisel-handling and glyptic influences, rather they were the result of skillful but natural behavior of the brush;
6) The chisel added nothing to the outlines and shapes of the letters;
7) The chisel cut only what was written;
8) It is no more difficult to chisel curved than straight letter parts;
9) The chisel can cut any shape written by the brush;
10) The written inscription was the important element and not the cutting;
11) Cast shadows of chiseled V-cuts did not (as some insist) influence and alter the basic letter shapes made by the brush;
12) The chisel by sinking the writing below the surface served only to guard the writing from effacement by weathering;
13) After chiseling the letters were repainted with minium to restore the original writing.
http://artlegacyleague.blogspot.hu/p/stone-lettering.htmlAnd here is how he wrote the letter B:
That texture, and actually that kind of letter constructing is what I'm after.