Ninety days of one letterform: the lowercase a

2026-08-09 · 3 min read

On 11 May I decided that my lowercase a in copperplate was the weakest letter I had, and that I would write a line of them every day for ninety days before moving on. Today is day ninety. I filled 23 pages of a practice pad at roughly 40 letters per page, so something over 900 attempts at a single letter, each taking perhaps four seconds. That is an hour of total pen-on-paper time spread over three months, which sounds like nothing written out, and I am slightly annoyed by how much it helped.

The fault at the start was the oval. My a began with an entry stroke, then a bowl that was too round, more like a circle than the 55-degree ellipse the script wants, and the downstroke on the right came in too far from the bowl, leaving a visible gap at the join. Day one looked like a child’s a with a hairline attached. I can see this clearly now because I dated every page.

What changed, roughly by week: in the first two weeks I fixed the slant by drawing guidelines at 55 degrees every 1 cm across the page and refusing to write without them. Weeks three to five were about the bowl, which I slowed right down, almost to a stop at the bottom, to get the ellipse to close against the downstroke. Weeks six to nine were pressure: a hairline up, a gradual swell to full shade on the downstroke, and a release before the exit. The exit hairline is the part I still get wrong on about one letter in five; it kicks out too sharply instead of curving.

Two practical things. The nib changed twice in ninety days, because a pointed nib wears and starts catching on the upstroke after about five or six hours of use; the second one went in on day 41 and the third on day 78. And the ink was thinned slightly with distilled water from day 20, about three drops per 10 ml, after I noticed the hairlines were skipping. Next up is the letter g, which shares the bowl, so some of this should carry over. The last page of a’s is pinned above the desk next to the first page, and the gap between them is the only review I need.