Write your character's name

[Myranda]

I'm having a heck of a time doing cursivey writing with an emphasis on "flowing" (without picking pen up off paper) rather than just fancy looking. The structure of several letters like s and h are difficult to write in a smooth motion, requiring retracing or sharp changes of direction that make the letters look rough or pulled-apart when I write them, and L and I become almost indistinguisable. Anyone have any thoughts on this stroke flow or flat-out stroke change (think s to cursive s in English)?

Taking some liberties to borrow from English cursive, I'm writing a lower case L to be a bit taller with a slight loop in it while an I looks basically like an English cursive i without the dot. For e I'm writing it more like a 3.

As an example, I found A and a are actually not too hard to write cursivey:
IMG
(this is hard to do with a mouse!)

I don't have a brush or marker, though. Just practicing with a pen. Might scan something at office later.

I'm by no means even close to knowledgeable about calligraphy and typefacing, but my own opinion holds that because Eorzean lettering seems to (in many cases, at least) deliberately swap parts of typeface anatomy in favor of aesthetics that depart from a more classical Latin/Roman alphabet, applying sweeping, cursive strokes might be a futile exercise.

I don't want to go so far as it can't be done, as someone out there may be more creative than me in figuring it out, but I will say it's tough to do, especially without gross changes to at least some of the letters.

Of particular trouble (at least as far as my experience goes) are those letters in Eorzean that are basically just mirrored Latin letters (i.e. the a, e, y and to some degree j and q). As a result, the ending hooks tend to be on the wrong side of the letter to smoothly flow into the next. You seem to have come up with a workable version for A, but the others I think will be tougher. c and g have extra vertical strokes compared to normal Latin variations too, making it hard to decide how to link the letters together without drawing too many connecting strokes over the strokes of the letters proper.

Also, not only is it hard to distinguish i and l, but add t as a 3rd letter than can be confused with those two as well, since in Eorzean it has no distinguishing crossbar.

[Leowilde]

FUN!