Goose Quills & Italic Hand

Cutting the goose-quills ended up both more and less difficult than I expected. They're working fairly well (so far) with the thin 17th century ink I made back in May. The paper is a 98lb cotton/lignin drawing paper I found at Blick.

It's a start. It's also pirate weekend at Faire.

Next up, I need to hash out the hand. I was aiming for a combination of Elizabeth I's Italic hand, supplemented with the Italian capital letters from A Booke Containing Divers Hands (1550). The letter (1554) written by the future queen has almost an entire set of minuscules, but only six capitals. I selected these two styles, as they were the closest-to-my-desired-time-period complete models I could get ahold of, and the capital A in each bears a close resemblance (the other capitals aren't very different, but have some variations on their flourishes). Unfortunately, I keep trying to slope the letters like Victorian cursive and/or add serifs based on some half-remembered Carolingian minuscules I learned in elementary school, so there's a lot of room to improve.