hi I'm Paul Antonio master scribe and creative director Paul Antonio scribe I've been doing calligraphy for 25 years my clients include Tiffany's John Malone about the British Museum how to write with a fountain pen these are a few of the fountain pens provided by the manuscript pen company again they come in varying sizes but they also come with different types of nibs some of the nibs have an oblique cut to them and some of them have a straight cut across the top so do be careful when you're choosing a pen what it actually looks like now there are many ways to write with a fountain pen you can decide are you going to use a fountain pen for handwriting or you going to use it a traditional calligraphy are you going to use it for quick informal writing or really formal structured lettering so what I'll do is I will just do some very quick handwriting treating the fountain pen as a fountain pen for everyday use and then I will also do some very formal calligraphy again treating it as a formal calligraphic tool but honestly if you do want to do form of calligraphy a dip pen is the best way to go this fountain pen has a cartridge inserted into it screwed off at the back you can write without the lid if you have small hands unlike me I have very large hands so I write with the lid on because it helps to balance and again using my Gira's pad you can't just play with the pen to start with let's just test it to see what it's going to do if it does anything so that's the size of the nib and it is moving around a little bit so you just need to make sure it's settled in its housing again don't press too hard so these are the same size or we can take a bigger one and I'm just dipping them that they do have ink in them but I am trying to get the ink flowing a little bit better this is using a converter to pull the ink up into the barrel so we can do some formal calligraphy treating it like handwriting practicing some small exercises to get the influent then you really want to practice draw some lines to help and find your writing make sure you stay between the lines if you want some free writing you could probably only work on one line and try to make the letters the same size if that's you or you can just use it as a guide and that's how to write with a fountain pen