Calligraphy equipment - what do you need to have to start calligraphy? Pt.1

Hi. Today I'm gonna tell you what kind of equipment you have to buy to start calligraphy - trust me,it doesn't have to be as proffesional as it sometimes seems like. For basic stuff I needed to start I spent something around $15 (around because I live in Poland, so we have different currency here). 


1. Pen 
Pen is the most important thing of the whole equipment and also it's the most expensive one. Actually you can get two types of them :

1. Traditional dip pen:
I've been using this one since three months (that's when I started calligraphy). It looks like that:

 Dip pen doesn't have any type of ink converters or place for cartriges. You just have to dip it in the bottle with ink as its name says. For me it is kinda annoying because you have to do that every 15 seconds so i prefer the second type of pen, about which I will tell you somethimg in a moment. But actually its annoying and comfortable in the same time, because this pen doesn't have any mechanism inside of it, changing colour of ink is much easier- the only part of this pen you have to clean is the nib and that takes literally few seconds.

 On the left you can see 4 other nibs I got in the set with this pen. Actually I got 5 nibs, the 5th one is in my pen one picture above. Those nibs have numbers on them (I'm not sure if you can see it or not) from 1 to 5 - no1 is the biggest (that is the one which is currently stuck in my dip pen) no5 is the smallest one (the one witch is the most on the right on the picture with nibs). The whole set was $4.






2. Normal pen with wide nib.
 I got this pen few days ago and I totally love it! Mine is made by Daler Rowney:

  It is more comfortable, because you can put cartrige in it, but cleaning this pen when you want to change ink colour takes much longer than cleaning dip pen. Currently I'm using ink conventer in this pen. I bought it in a set where was: this pen, 6 'upper parts' of pen with different sizes of nibs, 6 cartriges with black ink, ink converter. This pen was more expesive than my dip pen, the whole set was $20. 

On the second picture you can see this set (longer empty place is the one where the pen was, shorter one - where ink converter was)









 3. Cheaper option:
If you are not sure if calligraphy is something for you it is obvious that you don't want to spend $20 for a pen and some extra dollars for other things you need to have. Then a good option for you is to get yourself a highlighter. Highlighter has wide tip so you can use it as a normal pen, but it is much cheaper- you get highlighter for even less than a dollar.

When I was writing this post for you i decided to make it in two parts, because in one it would be really long so I am pretty sure that not a lot of you guys would read the whole thing. Second part on Friday (30th of June) - you will find there some info about ink and paper. Bye!