Like other artists, Islamic calligraphers honed their skills or worked out new ideas on practice sheets, repeating the same words—or even single letters—until the blank page was almost entirely covered in ink. Never intended to be read, such calligraphic "sketches" were appreciated by connoisseurs in the later Islamic period for their pure visual appeal. In this Ottoman example, mounted on ornamental paper and once preserved in an album, words and phrases written in the thuluth script have been repeated, interlaced, and reversed in orientation, resulting in an attractive weblike composition.