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Decoration can be stylised or realistic. The choice is yours - you are in control. Simple repetitive designs are easy to draw and look very effective. You can either leave them black and white or paint them. Try designing your own borders, or parts of them, for future reference.

You may have a particular colour combination you want to try out, or a design you would like to see bordering a piece of your calligraphy eventually. I have scraps of paper all over the place with bits and pieces of ideas in various stages of completion. They all give me inspiration for another, new, design to go with the work I am doing.

Use the pen nib to create decoration and borders. Short strokes of the pen will produce a diamond shape. The easiest way to get them regular and well-spaced is to draw them following the sequence 1 - 4 illustrated left. One or two of these dotted about within the text you write can look very effective in their simplicity.

Repetition of these strokes builds up a pleasing effect and infinite patterns can be built up. If you want to do a lot of theese it is worthwhile ruling guide lines. Try it with different size nibs. It's amazing what effect a simple repeat shape can have.

The decoration you use can be as simple or as complicated as you like. What do you realistically feel you can achieve? It is always worth doing preliminary sketches, with a short piece of writing, to see if the two go together. You also want know whether the decoration is going to look too over the top, or just right.