Posted to the Ornamental Penmanship list this week: a link to a blog post entitled, “The Dying Art of Penmanship“. It stirred up some talk, as usual. Yes, we’re relying more and more on advanced technology to get things done … as opposed to traditional technology, of course. After all, paint is technology, and so are metal pens.
The implication in these hand-wringing analyses that crop up from time to time is that we are somehow less involved in The Making of Things now that we’re using tablets and electronic palettes instead of dip pens and ink. I don’t think that’s true, but it is harder to stay grounded. “Blue? Wait, what’s it look like in magenta? Oh, no, that’s not so great. Let’s try a nice mossy green. Hmm. Maybe blue. How about a nice drop-shadow — or maybe a bevel …” It’s easy to allow oneself to be driven by the options rather than driving the design process. Those monks who traveled from England to Afghanistan and back for some lapis lazuli for their manuscript books — now they were driving their design process!
What’s missing today, perhaps, is the physical cause-and-effect aspect of making things. When I do hand lettering, the movement of my hand and arm is directly related to the shapes of the letters forming on the paper. The ink glistens on the pen, slides down the nib onto the paper, and dulls as it sinks into the paper. By contrast, the click of a mouse can do so many disparate tasks: cause a letter to appear on the screen, or color in a shape, or close a file.
Yesterday in my typography class, I was speaking with the professor about how I use Adobe Illustrator to prepare my hand-lettered artwork for reproduction. She told me that Wacom now makes a stylus-and-tablet that emulates a calligraphy pen, so that the artist writes directly on the tablet and calligraphy appears in the graphics application window. She insists that these styluses are as sensitive as traditional copperplate nibs and that all the commercial hand lettering being done today is done using these $3,000+ tablets. Hmm. I like technology. Really I do. But I can’t imagine liking this electronic pen. As Peter Thornton (who really needs to get a website!) says, “It’s not wet enough.”