caligráfica

Calligraphy Jag

I've been on something of a calligraphy jag lately -- finding a great deal of pleasure in lettering. The italic letter forms are coming easier -- I think I'm more suited to the smaller Brause 1.5 nib than the Speedball C-2. There's still a lot that needs improving but the flow is starting to feel natural. 

 The quotations I'm practicing have a Christmas theme.  I'd like to make something for the holidays but have no idea what. Maybe I'll just trying doing some lettering on envelopes. 

I'm trying not to press so hard, but it's difficult. I'm also still struggling a bit with ink flow (the two are likely related).  Still the letters are looking less heavy. 

I can't tell you how much pleasure doing this writing gives me. It's intensely relaxing and absorbing.

The above writing has been done on gridded practice paper, which as you can see has not just the base and ascender lines but also has slant lines as well. This makes it much easier to judge letter size and, of course, to keep a consistent slant.

Below are my first two attempts to work without slant lines on paper printed with lines from the Scribbler's generator.   

As you can see, the letters get fat / heavy again with fewer of the nice thicks and thins. There's lots to still practice, especially since I have to make my example book pages by our class next Wednesday. 

Good thing the practice is the best part for me. I enjoy the process a lot more than the outcome.  

 

Still More Italic Practice

I did more calligraphy practice tonight. I'm trying to move from the Speedball C-2 -- which I used for yesterday's work and for this first page today. 

As you can see, I'm having a little problem with ink flow.  I'm not sure what's up -- it's probably still to do with the pressure I'm putting on the nib. 

This second page was written with a Brause .2 nib. Again there's the problem of ink flow -- something which bothers me because I haven't had any problem using Brause nibs in the past. They're my favorite brand of nib because they're generally they're more forgiving of my tendency to press too hard. 

I like the Brause 2 nib. Going smaller is nice because the pen doesn't need to be dipped as often. Carrie gave us practice sheets from Scribbler's so we can try to go down as small as 3/4. The lines on those sheets are so close together I can't quite imagine it.  We'll see how it goes. 

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.

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)

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.

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.)

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.)

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.)

 

 

"E is for Ernest"

 The rain stopped last night and we woke to the sun shinning, which made my little calligraphy space look even friendlier.  

My practice tonight was a little different than it's been the last few days. Even though it was done a bit later than it has been in the past, I'd slept late this morning and spent the day out with Paul, so I was rested and wanted to do a bit more than I did last night or the night before.  

 Taking a large sheet (17" X 22"), a different nib (Brause 5mm), and the red-brown ink from yesterday.  I worked carefully through some letter combinations from Calligraphy Alphabets for Beginners to practice most of the alphabet.  The new nib was harder to get ink to start flowing from after each dip and I struggled a bit to keep the reservoir from touching the paper, but the nib felt sharper and like it made better and sharper marks than the Speedball C-0.

Some of the letters felt easier -- the alternative "s" is definitely easier to make. And I'm almost confident in making the letter "d."  But the "a" is still a real struggle and frustrates me.  However much I practice, it doesn't feel like I'm getting any better.  

Still, I felt pretty confident when I started tonight's "Tinies" line: E is for Ernest who choked on a peach." Once I started though, I felt otherwise. While it feels like the letter forms are getting better, my spacing doesn't feel right -- either within letters or between words. I suspect this is what I'm going to have to spend a lot of time practicing in the coming weeks.  Still, I'm not unhappy with how tonight's line came out. 

-o=0=o-

Other stuff: I find I'm looking at lettering a lot more where ever I am. When we watched the closing credits tonight of Terry Gilliam's film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, I noticed how lovely the cards on the closing credits were. I've also started reading a book by Marc Drogin, s Calligraphy of the Middle Ages. It's got some interesting bits of history in it, though I'm not sure how accurate it is. 

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.