Roman, Part IIa - Writing Roman, basics

Roman letters convey a sense of order and balance. This perhaps has something to do with their strict proportions. Roman letters occupy either a square, a half square or 4/5's of a square.

I find it easiest to practice the proportions writing with a sharpie marker.Once you're confident that you've got your proportions right and your strokes going straight up and down. You might want to switch to a broad edged pen and practice Roman pen letters.

The normal pen angle is around 30 degress, a bit less that the 45 degrees used for Italic. Since dip pens cannot be pushed (only pulled), you will have to learn to draw the letters in a different stroke order. The round letters such as O, C, G and Q are drawn in 2 strokes starting from the thinnest point of the letter (11 o'clock). The letter U is also done in 2 strokes, again meeting at the thinnest point (4 o'clock) coming down from the top. The letter S is done in 3 strokes.

You might want to increase the pen angle to 45 degrees for M's and N's and decrease it to 0 for the diagonal stroke of the letter Z to give it more weight. Note also that the letter M looks better when made a bit narrower than a W
Some faults. The letters C and G are slanted to the right. The top lobe of the letter B is larger than the bottom lobe. If anything, the bottom lobe should be equal in size or slightly bigger than the top such that the letter does not look top heavy. The lobes of the letters D, B, P and R should look like a train tunnel turned on its side, i.e. coming out straight and then curving down rather than a semicircle. The lobe of the P is a nice example while the lower lobe of the B is not.

Just to get ahead of myself a bit, I have included two variations on the last line which correspond to a W and two O's. The thickest part of the one O should intersect with the thinnest part of the other (easier said than done). These are used to improve spacing when needed. More on that in the article on spacing.

Roman, Part I - History and the evolution of the serif

The modern European letters have their roots in Roman and Greek. The Greeks did not seems to have shared the Roman passion for carving writing in stone; and how fortunate that the Romans did. It seems hard to imagine that we were that close to writing Uncial and Gothic instead of Roman, but the revival of Roman letters only came when Ren
aissance scholars found Roman letters carved in relics.

Romans never actually wrote in the letters that we now call Roman. Manuscripts suggest that they had an everyday script which was written with a broad edge pen (most likely to be a reed pen of sorts). Thus it was a sans serif script in the beginning. The modern serifed Roman was an engravers script which cannot be "written" properly without undue exertion, in fact serifed letters were only found in carvings. The rationale for the creation of the serif, or rather it's postulated evolutionary steps from the pen written daily script, had been outlined by Wotzkow in the book "The Art of Hand Lettering". Here I borrow the reasoning and the illustrations from the book.

Wotzkow argues that incised Roman letter might well have started out as a copy of pen letters, i.e.
But it was difficult to obtain good optical spacing with slanted endings, thus the masons decided to flatten the legs of the letters and made them horizontal, like this:This created a technical problem as it was hard to get sharp corners with straight edges when carving stone, thus and extra cut was added to sharpen the corner. This meant that corners would become wider than the stroke. That had the extra advantage in that it looked really good, so masons enlarged it beyond the necessary proportions and it became the serif as we know today.