Brush-painted Kannada on the walls of a primary school in Karnataka.

It’s always interesting to see how completely different the top bar of Kannada looks depending on the angle of the pen – in this case, it flips backward with a wedge shape. With an opposite pen angle, the top bar stroke exits to a fine point. (I should probably post a diagram!) See how this could interest me to a high level of geekery?

Note the instroke on the bottom of the hat on the “Pa”, (and pha, ṣa, sa, gha) character. In most typefaces, this is rendered as an unconnected dot. Part of my research is trying to discover where this mysterious mark has come from. More on that later 😉

Photos from tdiemut’s flickr album.