Calligraphy & more — the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
Daily lettering – homework in preparation for a workshop with Peter Thornton later this month. Nothing like Roman capitals to make you feel like a child again. Day 6, page 9, progress … maybe.
Strathmore Drawing 400 paper (80#), 4B pencil, 1/2″ height. I started the homework at 1″ height for a few pages, moved to 3/4″ height for a few more pages, and this is the first page done at 1/2″ height.
Some days the daily lettering actually has another purpose besides just practice. As it does today. These are four of a bunch of thank-you notes I wrote today. I was way behind.
I also finished a commission. I may show an image of it in a month or so, when it’s no longer a surprise to the recipient. I’ll give you a hint, though: it’s a poem that is requested often. I think I did it the first time in 1986, and have probably done it every other year, on average, since then. It’s long and oh so androcentric. I was quite pleased with the way this iteration turned out.
Working on Zerkall smooth with a Brause 3mm nib, the pen is sticking in the turns. Yes, I have a good cushion. The ink is stick ink, maybe Chinese, but I’m not sure. It’s a round cylinder of a stick ink. Tomorrow I’m switching to something else — changing both paper and ink, probably. These are some of the letters — or at least they want to be the letters — that we studied over the weekend with Christopher Haanes.
Like all good workshops, this workshop was like suspending one’s regular workout practice at the gym to work with a personal trainer for a little bit. At the gym, you know in the back of your mind that you haven’t really doing those squats properly, and you tend to skimp on triceps reps, and maybe it’s been awhile since you even visited that corner of the gym that houses the medicine balls.
Along those same lines, at this workshop I revisited ink choices, spent some much-needed time with pen manipulation and pressure. Oh, and it had been a good while since I had visited that very large corner of calligraphy that houses the Roman capitals.
Day two of bookhand. This is Mitchell #2.5 nib, 8mm x-height, Strathmore Drawing 400 heavier weight. Rather stuck. I believe I’ll go down in size a little today. It’s just that there’s a big jump in size from a Mitchell #2.5 to a #3 nib.
I’ve been doing some blackletter work recently, and I’ve been doing some Hebrew lettering. (This latter is more a labor of love than of skill, so I doubt you’ll be seeing any of it here.)
But the spring workshop sponsored by the Big Sky Scribes guild is coming up soon. I’m really looking forward to the workshop, which Christopher Haanes will be teaching. Today Amity Parks posted a practice sheet that she had just completed in preparation for the workshop and I realized hey, I need to be getting ready too! After today’s daily lettering session, picture here, it’s even more clear that hey, I need to be getting ready!
This is Moon Palace sumi ink, a Mitchell #2.5 nib, and Strathmore Drawing 400 heavyweight paper. Smartphone photo in poor light.
I have little affinity for blackletter styles and clients request blackletter (“Gothic”) calligraphy only a few times a year, so I don’t work on it much. This year my study of the Fraktur exemplars which Yukimi Annand generously shared with me has made work on these historic register certificates more enjoyable.
Today I made a couple of faux-medieval invitations for a madrigal dinner. (The invitee’s name is of course quite clear on the original; it will be presented in person later this week.) Although the image doesn’t show it well, the paper (80-lb. Strathmore Drawing 400) was tea-dyed.
I did a number of trials to determine what papers are suitable for tea dyeing, how long to soak the paper, whether it would be better to print the coat of arms (created in Photoshop for the event) before or after, whether I should letter on the paper before or after tea dyeing, and so on.
I printed the coat of arms before dyeing the paper because the inkjet ink is waterproof and I liked the printing better after dyeing. Then I dyed paper by soaking it in a Pyrex dish of Lipton Iced Tea (2 family size bags in a teakettle of boiling water) for 2-5 minutes. In one the earliest trials I put the dyed paper between waxed paper to dry, but this created a pattern (which I liked but didn’t concide with my intention); my final solution was to dry the papers between shop towels sandwiched between large sheets of blotting paper and under a few pieces of corrugated cardboard with a heavy-ish book on top.
I wove together two blue ribbons and a gold rattail cord to make the cords that keep the scrolls rolled up. A 9″ x 14″ scrolled piece of paper is rather fragile, so at the last minute I decided to make boxes to hold the scrolls. I used some scrap gold matboard and some more of the washi tape I used for this book in January. The boxes definitely qualify as ephemera; washi tape, at least this washi tape, is not very sticky and doesn’t stay stuck for long.
Today’s daily lettering — a quotation about inspiration by Heloise.
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
Lettering on tricot nylon/ spandex — not the easiest substrate — with Zig markers: scroll, brush, and Writers. No planning, because it’s for a costume party this evening. And I had to come up with the content. Family commissions are often the most difficult of all.
(The asterisk is a small tribute to Kurt Vonnegut.)
Developing an exemplar is one of the most humbling exercises that a calligrapher can undertake. Having spent hours on this one, a number of thoughts tumble (my original typo “thumble” seems apt) through my head, in no particular order:
Sigh. Well, I do like the P and R … That leaves only 24 letters that need work.
I used a partially dried-out 5mm Zig marker so that students can see how the letters are being made.
