caligráfica

Final Project: Winding Things Up

(Found in my Drafts folder -- this was written in 2009 -- it's about my final project for DeAnn's gothic textura class. The project remains unfinished. O the shame.)

My last gothic class was a while ago.  It ended wonderfully.  I'm still amazed at what a great time I had learning and doing it.  We had a two week break, but tomorrow is my first copperplate class

 I spent Friday afternoon  with DeAnn Singh, my teacher, talking about finishing.  What I've done is a layer of gilding on the initial capital (a T) and have started painting the decorative illumination. 

 

Jittery Hands

I did practice calligraphy yesterday -- something I'd planned to do all weekend -- but discovered that when I'm emotional my hands shake. Try as I might, I couldn't clear my mind and relax into lettering. I quit after an hour.  I'm going to try and get back to it today with a clearer, happier head.

Guess this counts as an excuse. 

New Class: Foundational Hand

After finishing my dissertation (finally) and taking a break of over a year, I've started taking calligraphy classes again. Unfortunately I can't take DeAnn Singh's classes, despite her now being famous because of a wonderful and much deserved article in the LA Times, but am taking a course on Fine Tuning the Fundamentals from Carrie Imai Wednesday nights at RAND.  

My first lesson is tomorrow (I missed the first two classes but have been given catch up homework to work on this week.  I've cleaned and dusted off my calligraphy space, pulled out my pens and inks and am ready to get back to it. So far, if practice is any guide, I'm not very good at this hand (we're starting with foundational).  But I find the practice soothing and it's great to be putting ink to paper again.  

More soon. 

New Classes

An update you on how the gothic project turned out to be posted later.  Meanwhile...

...yes, I'm back.  But this time I have some good reasons for being away.

 Yesterday  I practiced (copperplate) calligraphy for the first time in over a month -- Thursday was my first class (uncial) in almost as long.  What happened you ask?

For reasons too complex and boring to go into here, I had to defend my dissertation months ahead of schedule (have I mentioned I'm a PhD student in English?  Anyway, that too.). To be able to do this, I had to spend 3.5 weeks writing.  Write I did too, more than 100 pages, right up to the very last moment.  As Flanders and Swann said, it was all right for quantity, but there wasn't much I could do about the quality by that point.

The shocking news was that it was approved by my committee.  Barring some revisions which I'm excited about having the chance to make, my PhD is finally done.  I'm still recovering from the combined shock and exhaustion.  This past weekend, spent in Santa Barbara with Paul, went a long way toward bringing me back to earth 

Now, update is over, back to calligraphy...

I'm starting back to my copperplate class tomorrow.  Here's a sample sheet by DeAnn:

She's recommended a orange red ink which is a lovely bright color and works especially well with the pointed pen.  I'm surprisingly nervous at returning and being behind, especially after seeing what everyone else is doing and knowing I haven't been practicing at all.  However, last week when I attended her uncial class (more later) DeAnn promised to give me extra tutoring so I can catch up.  We've got a bit of a trade going on as I worked on her blog to give it a more unified look with her website. 

On Thursday I attended my first uncial class at RAND, also with DeAnn.  It's a totally different sort of hand.  Eventually we'll switch to the broad chiseled nib, like we used for gothic, but for now we're using speedball nibs.  I've never used them before -- it's quite a change.  It gives the hand an art deco look that's interesting.  

 

I'm still struggling a bit with the proporitions of the letters, something you'll see when I start posting pictures of my own stuff.  

How will it work having two lettering clases going at once, one pointed pen, one not?  Who knows.  What I do know is I've missed lettering a lot and am thrilled to be back at it. 

Simplicity and the Student Scribe

 I've finally gotten back into practicing calligraphy (the fact my dad was staying out of town this weekend is likely connected to my returned focus).  For the past couple of days I've both had stuff I've wanted to blog here and have also been practicing lettering.  What's happened is that I've done the calligraphy and left the blogging to now, just keeping the practice album up-to-date.  Our apartment seems to be getting re-organized and cleaned room by room.  It's amazing the amount of weird stuff we were saving -- including cardboard boxes and odd bits of outmoded technology.  Purging things is hard for me, but once I start it feels so good I don't want to stop.

Here's an odd fact though -- my motivation to get the house organized seems connected to practicing calligraphy.  Further, the cleaning and organizing has moved outward from my calligraphy "studio" (as a friend pleases me by calling it)  into the restof the apartment.  I've organized (and now try and keep tidy) our entire bedroom (which means keeping up on laundry since otherwise it takes over the floor).  My dad moving in prompted me/us to re-organize the bathroom and guest room.  This weekend we worked on the box room / technology closet.  Having things organized has me feel a bit more centered (always a good thing).  

 Getting organized required a bit of shopping, prompting us to brave both Costco and IKEA on a weekend.  We got an amazing deal on a great set of chrome storage shelves (for the closet) at Costco for less than $28.  They're amazing because despite the low price they don't suck and each shelf can supposedly hold 350 lbs. Nonetheless, Paul and I have not tried sitting on one together in order to test this claim. It does seem to be doing a great job holding stuff.  At Ikea we found new bedside lamps (whose glow adds to the general peaceful feeling of my bedroom studio), curtains and a recycle bin.  All are much nicer than I'd have expected, given the price.  The lamps and curtains combined didn't cost half what one of the lamps I'd been eyeing at Pottery Barn for the same purpose

Something you may have noticed when looking at the most recent Tinies is the addition of rather shaky Gothic capitals.  I'll blog more about last Monday's class later (Deann has an entry about it up on her site), but in addition to going over our recent homework, taking us down from a 5mm to 2 1/2mm nib, and discussing the coming illumination project, she also introduced capitals.  The reason wasn't that we're really advanced enough, but rather that class is being cancelled by two Monday holidays in a row and she wanted us to have a chance to practice with the capitals.  On the "K is for Kate" I'm experimenting with using a reddish brown ink for the "K" and "Kate" but as the ink is thinner than the black, I'm not sure how it works out.  Like most of my lettering practice, it looks a lot better photographed than it does in person.

Coming Illumination Project

Our big assignment for the Gothic course is to produce a 60-80 word sheet of illuminated text.  The text can be a quotation from any period, but Deann expressed a strong desire we choose something from the appropriate period (about 1100-1500 AD).  I don't want to do anything Biblical because, well, I don't.  So I'm considering some passages of Dante, Chaucer (though probably not Chaucer) and also some quotations by William of Occam.  Doing it in Latin would be cooler, but given that I leave letters out all the time when writing in English, who knows how many time I'd have to re-write it to make sure I got the Latin right?

We got supply list for the project so another bit of the weekend shopping involved a trip to Dick Blick's in West LA.  I love going there.  It's always well organized and stocked (unlike, for example, Pearl) and the staff are friendly and helpful.  I left the store some $130 poorer, but with everything on my list plus a few other toys.  It's my plan to write an entry tomorrow about the tools I'm using so I'll save my shopping finds to discuss there.  

(Guest modeling by Carrots and Small Bear.)

Making ink

Yesterday morning, in addition to making my usual coffee, I decided to try and brew some walnut ink. We'd worked with it in our first class and I'd loved two things about it. First the tea-brown color, browner than the reddish ink I've been using, was lovely and showed each stroke (which keeps me honest). Second walnut ink is non-toxic and easy to clean up with water. The deep black Higgins ink is beautiful and makes rich letters, but the black ink doesn't rinse off the nib easily. Since I often practice before bed, easy clean-up is attractive.

I ordered some walnut crystals from an eBay seller ($3 plus shipping) and they arrived quickly. This was my first attempt to mix writing ink.

It was surprisingly difficult to find the right proportions of water to crystals since most of the on-line recipes are by scrapbookers making the ink as a paper stain -- too light to write with, before I found a recipe in the December Society for Calligraphy newsletter. It's simple enough, 1 teaspoon of crystals to 1/2 cup of hot water and let brew for at least 30 minutes. I cut the recipe in half because the glass bottles I have only hold a quarter cup.

In the picture, the note is stuck to the measuring cup because I realized the brewing ink looks exactly like strong coffee so I was worried Paul would find it and toss it out when loading the dishwasher.)

I think the ink came out well, except I remembered too late the on-line advice to mix in a bit of vinegar to keep the ink from spoiling. I added a teaspoon of white vinegar which unfortunately thinned out the ink. I probably need to leave the bottle open for a day or two to evaporate a bit. An open bottle of ink -- sounds like a recipe for a disaster!

Lettering practice went pretty well yesterday. Unfortunately, by the time I finished filling a practice sheet with the letters, I was tired and one of the tines of my pen had started to bend a bit. The Gorey line, "F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech" didn't come out as well as I'd hoped.

Still, I'm all packed and about to catch the bus for class. Without knowing whether I should bring them our not, Paul and I rolled up all the practice sheets I've done. Doing so made me realize I should get a folio and a tube to keep these sheets safely and neatly.

(Special guest modeling by Jeremy Hedgehog.)

 

 

D is for Desmond

 "D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh."

 Tonight's work, done once again too late at night. I got caught up in getting this blog going, playing with the banner (which I'm quite pleased about) and then suddenly it was after 11 but I hadn't yet done any lettering. I was tempted to wait until tomorrow, but decided that daily practice is best.  Partly to make the clean-up easier, I opted for a water-based ink (in a reddish brown that looks rather like blood) rather than the black Higgins ink.

My first hour was spent doing a copy of a worksheet, practicing letter forms.  You can see a copy in the album or in the first post -- I've done it about five times now. When I finished it was a lot easier to move onto tonight's Gorey line. The 35 degree angle came a bit easier today, maybe because I did a practice sheet before I started the lettering, but the spacing is still difficult and feels like it's getting worse rather than better. I used the alternative "s" and found it a bit easier. 

Clearly I don't know how to do numbers.