caligráfica

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.

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.