caligráfica

Italic Calligraphy Practice

The calligraphy class at RAND is focused on the italic hand right now. I've been struggling with it more than I would have expected.  It's not the letter forms that have been a challenge (though I'm definitely struggling with the letter "s") but the problem of pen angle and pressure. 

Carrie has been helping me, both of us thinking that I had so internalized the 30 degree pen angle of the foundational hand that I was unable to switch to the 45 degree angle that's needed for italic lettering. However, when she was going over my homework she saw another issue -- I press too hard on the pen nib which makes it go wider and makes my strokes too full.  It's true, I write with something like an death grip, holding the pen too tightly and pushing on the nib too hard. 

We're not meeting next week (though there's a playdate the Saturday after Thanksgiving) so my goal is to break myself of the pressure habit between now and then.  I'm definitely feeling into calligraphy right now -- I came home from class and then practiced for another two hours. Italic is a beautiful hand and one I at which I would really like to have some level of mastery.

Foundational Book Project

I've spent the last few weeks learning and practicing the foundational hand. It's deceptively simple looking and definitely difficult in practice. Last week we learned the capitals (or majuscule) -- which are even harder than the miniscules (or lower case).  I spent last Saturday at a calligraphy play date at RAND trying to improve and mostly ended up feeling inadequate.

Here's what a day of practice got me:

I'm still struggling but belive me, these majuscules are a struggle. This practice sheet was done on graph paper which accounts for the somewhat decent spacing.

Carrie is having us work on a project for the class, a personal book of the foundational hand.  She's given us rather beautiful paper covers to use.

Inside the cover, we're supposed to have a title page.  Here's mine, at least the first draft.  I'm not happy with the spacing. I'm still living in my gothic past, but the foundational hand isn't supposed to be quite so tight.

 
The next page is the foundational  hand alphabet in miniscule (lower case). This is a pretty good reflection of my skill level right now. I see quite a bit of wobble in my letters and know there's a lot of room for improvement, but I'm trying to see this as a snapshot of my skills at this point. Hopefully someday I'll be able to look back and see quite a bit of improvement. 

The third, and as of now the last, page is supposed to be a brief quotation. I chose one from Chaucer that feels appropriate to my calligraphy study.

Foundational Hand 9/14 Class

Buses! I was late for class because of the buses and the elaborate check-in procedure at RAND. Will have to leave earlier next week. :(

Class was interesting tonight. We put our homework on the board and Carrie pointed out areas we needed work. My lower case c, e, z and a came in for criticism, but my n and m were deemed nicely rounded. We then worked through the lower case alphabet again, focusing on the circular forms and learning some nice variations on the w. Whereas the gothic style was all about keeping a consistant 45 degree pen angle, the curves of the foundation hand mean that the pen angle has to be varied by the direction of the stroke.  This was not easy

One interesting thing I noticed about the group at RAND, they like to talk calligraphy via numbers and angles. I'm not very mathmatically inclined and found myself tuning out in ways that weren't helpful because what we were studying was important.  Further, I'm going to need to be better about packing my supplies. Carrie pointed out the class supply list to me and I was abashed to discover I didn't have the right tools for the lesson. I was like that kid at school that never has his kit and has to borrow from other people or the teacher. Since it was my first lesson, I think I was forgiven, but it's not a reputation I want. 

So tomorrow I get to go to Graphaids for some paper and a few other things and then can start working on my practice book project. Can hardly wait. 

 

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. 

Final Project (so far) Continues

 I spent most of my free time this past weekend working on my final illumination project.  I really should have done the writing and drawings onto vellum, but I chickened out and instead did a mock-up on card. The lettering is definitely getting more regular, though it's still a bit uneven in terms of spacing. I colored it with colored pencils and gold ink, though the final version will have gold leaf and be painted. 

In going over the mock-up, DeAnn suggested I make the letter "t" a bit larger so it will contrast better against the gold.  Further, she said I should work on my Lombardic caps (the ones at the top) so they're a bit closer together and slightly more regular.  That's what I worked on yesterday.  Everyone liked the little dragon, which is a variation on one I saw on a sketch by an SCA artist (though sadly I can't remember whose sketch it was).  

I did a trial run of the lettering on the vellum in class.  It came out okay, except I wrote the wrong word (repeated "Artificer" when I should have used "Authority").  It probably doesn't matter, but this will bug me so I'm going to redo it once more and then work on the sketching and color mixing..  

Next week will be our last class.  The plan is that we'll stay there until we feel we've gotten our projects finish, or to the point where we feel we can finish them at home. 

Final Project (so far)

For the past week and a half I've been working on my final project for calligraphy class - even doing some while I at a hotel for GallifreyOne (the Doctor Who convention at LAX) this past weekend. It's a piece of writing with illumination (it will include at least one gold leaf letter). As I mentioned earlier, I had a bit of trouble picking out what to write as I didn't want to do a passage from the Bible. What I settled on were lines from Dante's Inferno.

Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my High Artificer;
My maker was Divine Authority,
The Highest Wisdom, and the Primal Love.
Before me nothing but eternal things were made,
And I endure eternally.
Abandon all hope, Ye who enter here.

It seems appropriately gothic. My first pass was writing in the original Italian, but I discovered pretty quickly that even in English I have a hard time not missing out letters and even whole words. I've been writing the passage almost every day for the past few days. It's getting better, but the spacing still feels rough.

Okay the first image is really my second version, but I can't find the first one (I may have forgotten to photograph it). Mostly what I was trying to do here, in addition to practicing the letters (the .1 1/2 Brause nib still feels quite small), was figure out if the passage was about the right length. After looking at it, my teacher made a few suggestions and said I needed to let go of the verse length / line issue and try and make the passage (as much as possible) a block of text. Then began the search for a letter "T" to pencil copy and illuminate.

The next one is a mock-up with a tracing of a letter "T" added and an attempt (bad attempt) to pencil in the Lombardic capitals. What I realized was I couldn't pencil the Lombardic capitals very well. So I printed out some text in the right size to try and figure out how many would fit and then got to work on the spacing. I decided to do a smaller illumination on the bottom "A" to add emphasis to the final "Abandon..." line. On my teacher's advice, I made the "A" smaller.

Tonight I'm going to try and redo the sheet once again and trace out the illuminated letters and Lombardic capitals. I've also got a border to try and draw. I find the idea of doing the drawing, gilding and painting even scarier than the lettering.

My vellum sheet looks so lovely and perfect. The idea of starting to mark it is frightening.

World's Cutest Police Car?

The other day I was at my calligraphy class, which is held at a middle school in Beverly Hills.  When I came out I saw the following very cute SmartCar police car.  It's a real police car, complete with lights and siren.  So very cute -- and like all SmartCars it looks like you could pick it up and tuck it in your pocket.

SmartCars have long held a certain fascination for me. Back in 1999, the first summer I spent in Edinburgh, I spent hours wandering the city, stalking a green one I desperately wanted to tae a picture of.  When they started appearing in Los Angeles a couple years ago, again I stalked them, less for pictures than just to look at them and smile.  It's not just their smallness -- they somehow look confident -- they remind me of a small terrier hanging with the big dogs, all the cuter for not seeming to know that it's tiny.

Another oddness about them is the way so often in Los Angeles they seem to have two people in them -- the maximum capacity.  Maybe it's fuel economy, but I like to think it's because, like me, other people love the little cars. 

Now all I need is to find someone with one to drive me around.  Though it's probably not a good idea to try and get arrested, even in Beverly Hills.

Cozy just got cozier

Monday's class was lots of fun. Given that I'd packed up some of my practices, I was delighted to find them being collected. Apparently we'll be getting them back with comments from DeAnn (there's DeAnn writing a student's name on their practice sheet). The class is large (14 students) so this is the best way for us to get individualized feedback. Paul was also pleased to hear I'd had to turn in "homework" and would be getting it back with corrections marked.

The second class focused mostly on refining the topics covered in the first class. The central emphasis was focused on the font, gothic textura, being all about texture (achieved via "true picket fence" spacing), even more than individual letters or even readability. Whilst this seems odd or even backward from a modern perspective, it's important to understand where the medieval reader and writer were coming from. The process of making parchment, as can be seen in this Getty demo, was a long and costly, each page coming from the skin of an a single animal (generally sheep or cattle). Gothic textura dates from ~1100 - 1500, the end of the Middle Ages, before paper was widely manufactured or used. Making medieval texts were labor intensive and expensive. As DeAnn pointed out, these weren't newspapers but were written to be re-read. Reader of texts were generally already familiar with what they were reading so it was more important that the significance of the text be conveyed through its beauty.

Another reason texture became important again harkens to the expense of books, especially the cost of parchment. Gothic textura has less white space that other fonts which both gives the text visual weight and makes use of as much parchment as possible. I've tried to take this spacing information (both inline and between lines) as I've practiced the past few days. I can see a difference, but mostly to me I feel things are looking messier rather than neater. Time will tell I guess. I'm trying hard not to be too hard on my work, but just trying to do it each day's work, focussing on the issues raised in class.

Okay, that said, I did jump a little ahead the other night by playing a bit with Gothic capitals (something we haven't covered at all) on the Tinies work, "G is for George smothered under a rug." Really what I'm supposed to be doing as practice is just drawing lines with the space between equal to the width of the nib. I can only do that for a sheet each night though (and that's the maximum) before my focus wavers. I found when I stopped doing the Tinies, I stopped practicing at all. So I'm back at it, with plans to work through the whole alphabet. Last night was "H is for Hector done in by a thug."

What about the title? It's simple enough. My cozy calligraphy space got cozier because of the addition of a small space heater ($35, purchased from Amazon). Much as chilly scribing is historically correct, once a week at class is plenty.

(Special guest appearance by Stanley Fish.)

New Year, New Hobby?

Despite the fact I should really be working on my dissertation all day, every day in every bit of available free time for the next six months, I've decided to celebrate this year by taking a calligraphy class, something I've been wanting to do for at least the last twelve year.. Yesterday was the first of a series of seven calligraphy classes (three hours each).

The class isn't ideal starting point as it's on the Gothic Textura (14th-15th century) hand. Gothic Textura is a very angular, formal hand that's difficult to read and slow to write. It's lovely when done properly, but pretty unforgiving of errors in style or spacing. Had I been choosing, I would probably have opted for a pointed pen (copperplate) class. But this class is on the right day, at the right time and in a location I can easily reach by bus.

While any Gothic hand isn't an ideal starting point, I do have some background in chisel nib, specifically Italic, lettering. After buying a cartridge-style lettering kit when I was 13, I practiced for hours and hours, took at least one course and got pretty good. My interested in lettering complemented an undergraduate focus on medieval history and literature and I spent days and hours quietly writing and copying in at the old Getty and Huntington. Unfortunately, I made a totally amateur mistake and decided to letter all the envelopes (inner and outer) for my first wedding. They looked lovely and people were impressed. However, there were more than two-hundred envelopes to letter. I wasn't really fast enough to take on that sort of project and in order to finish them in time, I had to work six hours a night, every night for a month. What had been a fun and rewarding hobby became the worst grind of my life. For about five years after, I wanted nothing to do with lettering, even giving my pens and books away.

This changed in 1999, the first summer I spent with Paul in Edinburgh. There were a number of reasons for it, but the short version is Paul was working all day, I was spending a lot of time at the (alas now closed) James Thins, the Museum of Scotland and keeping a daily, sketch-filled journal. On a whim I bought a new calligraphy pen, a lovely Rotring ArtPen I still sometimes use, and started practicing Italic lettering again. At the same time, Paul and I visited the Museum of Scottish Education in Glasgow and I bought a basic dip pen.

 What I learned was that as much as I had learned to use a chiseled cartridge pen, I had no idea how to use a dip pen effectively, certainly not to do anything like 19th or early 20th century Copperplate script. In 2008, with the help of some library books, I taught myself how to use a dip pen for some basic Italic and Copperplate hands. Again, nothing very impressive but it was enough to realize that if I was ever going to get any better I needed some formal classes. (I've got samples of all of these, but the idea of posting it doesn't really appeal much -- maybe another time).

Enter yesterday and the Gothic Textura class. We spent the first half hour or so going over materials (dip pens only, C-0 nibs, inkwells, paper, drawing boards, rulers and the like). We're all supposed to use identical materials, at least to start, including making a little paper sleeve to use to keep our rulers on our drawing board.

  Yesterday the instructor had us use walnut ink (lovely color -- too bad I'd need to order it in crystal form in order to make more) because it's transparent enough to show every stroke. For the next two hours I filled a giant sheet of paper with lines made at 0, 90, 45 and finally 30 degrees. It was amazingly engrossing.

Finally, in the last half hour of class I was allowed to move onto the basic strokes and letters. Normally we wouldn't have done the alphabet so soon, but as next Monday is the MLK holiday, we'll be practicing on our own for two weeks.

Did I mention I'm loving this? I suspect that's coming through, at least a bit.