It’s a bit of a wrongly chosen term, actually. “Kakizome”  (書き初め) refers to the first calligraphy that you write in the new year, a tradition still upheld by many Japanese, so in my case I’d probably need to call it “Kakiosame” (書き納め) – kind of the last calligraphy of the old year, but it’s the same spirit.

As every year I had to prepare my new year’s greetings card and this time I thought it would be nice to do some calligraphy – I haven’t touched a dip pen or penholder in a long time… I usually prefer to write blackletter scripts, because I’m more familiar with them and can write most of them by heart without having to look at a specimen chart, but somehow this time around I couldn’t produce any remotely satisfying results.

So I thought I might as well do something more “improvised” and try to write in a less strict more expressive manner, something loosely based on a Humanist script. I usually never write Humanist script, because it takes quite a lot of precision to make it look good, and most people start with Humanist script (it’s closer to our modern alphabet), so it’s a bit overused these days…

Here’s where I gave up. The “c” in “Schafes” is too far away from the “h” and the “S” is a bit botchy, but I just went with this version and be done with it. Daily practise would be a good idea next time.