Calligraphy and book arts in the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
Happy New Year! This year I’m taking on the challenge of Smashing Magazine to Design Something Every Day.
My plan, dubbed “Circadian Characters,” is to create and blog a letter a day. The theme for the first 26 letters, at least, is “Wood.” Here’s the first Character of the New Year, done with a pack of flat wooden toothpicks (Stimudents):
With all the chaos here, I had gotten behind in my exchange envelope commitments. Not anymore. I’m all caught up … until July 1. In keeping with these hard economic times, the theme for these is Frugality. Recycled envelopes, a dried-up Zig calligraphy marker, and a re-purposed Zig Millennium mark cut to a chisel edge with an X-acto blade.
The envelopes frame a bit of doodling. I don’t know what to do with it, so it just sits on the table reproaching me for my indecisiveness.
As usual, click on the image to get a closer look.
Click on the thumbnail above for a larger image.
Some fun with type punched out over a pasted-painted background, and hand lettering over a wall of Velvenda Cooler type, done for Print Design class. The quotation is from Henry Adams. I’m working toward integrating hand lettering with type. “Toward” being the operative word here. The print version of this has better contrast, by the way, and at 11″ x 17″ the background type on the right was a more noticeable and readable list of adjectives.
This two-page spread (click on the thumbnail picture for a full-size image) was created for the centerfold of a 12-page book designed in typography class this past semester. These were the only pages that had no photographic images, and my aim was to try to synthesize my experience of lettering into a modern piece that would work as hand lettering in a typography setting. I don’t know that I succeeded, but the experiment was interesting. All of the quotations in this piece revolve around the theme of the book: time.
When I was in high school, well before I took up lettering (or maybe not, now that I think about it!), I made these elaborate doodles I called “scribbles”, which relied more on color for their design. Looking back through this blog, I see that I’ve never posted one of those, although I still have several of those early scribbles. I’ll plan to do that sometime.
Kat Ran Press has a display of stamps designed by type designers. The list includes such luminaries as Hermann Zapf, Adrian Frutiger, and Eric Gill, and even reaches back to Peter Behrens and W.A. Dwiggins.
I’m showing Julian Waters‘ stamp lettering here in honor of Veteran’s Day. Besides being a great type designer, Julian is a brilliant calligrapher. His childhood was filled with calligraphy on his mother’s side and book conservation on his father’s side. Boy, do I envy him that. (He envies me my childhood piano lessons, but really, I just don’t think they begin to compare.)
via zeldman.com
The current assignment in History & Theory of Graphic Design is this: Design a deck of playing cards, or a chess set, in the graphic design period of our choosing. Assuming I choose De Stijl as my period, these are elements of my design at the left. The card denominations will be rendered in this “font” made by creating a 5×9 black-block grid (+1 for the tail of the Q) and subtracting blocks from it for each character.
Following are the four suits:
1 – Van Doesburg
2 – Mondrian
3 – Van der Leck
4 – Huszar (not completed yet)
It’s a whole lotta square.
Edited to add: Looking at this post I realize I’m missing an A for Ace. It’s the zero in the Roman numerals of cards, I guess.
Here’s a bit of an antidote to all that square. A somewhat random image, I know, with stream-of-consciousness text, but randomness and stream-of-conscious are just what’s needed after a bout with De Stijl.
I broke out the pen and ink this morning. This nib was on its last legs but I only had three lines of sample lettering to send via email to a client, so I powered through.
Later I went back to the drawing table for the somewhat unfamiliar pleasure of lettering, and to convince myself to throw the nib away. I’m convinced.
Not much to show lately. It’s all been either wedding invitation addresses or learning software or typographic exercises.
I recently addressed 75 envelopes made of handmade paper that seems to have been abandoned at the pulp stage. Throughout the work, my thoughts kept circling around to how many decades of experience it’s taken for me to arrive at the point where I could actually letter on such a surface. But a blog post can’t really illuminate that particular battle.
I could show you my really lame 1st video in Final Cut, but really, why would you want to see it? In short, I made a vector-art flowerpot pretend-water three pen-drawn flowers so that they grow. It’s a steep learning curve, and I’m slow.
The typographic exercises are nothing to write home (or here) about. During the last exercise I kept thinking how much easier it would be to hand letter. Maybe I’ll do a comparison in another post.
Shown here is something I did last night during a telephone meeting, when my hand was mostly disengaged from the brain. The pen is a Speedball nib and the Schmincke gouache was left over from drawing the flowers for the Final Cut project …
Today I spent an inordinate amount of time searching my studio for a set of color trials that I just know are in here somewhere. It’s so frustrating. I made glair, the book pages are ready, the copy-fitting has been worked out, and I’m ready to do it. I just don’t know what colors, exactly.
Towards the end of the day I cleaned out the right two columns of my post office boxes, taking the opportunity to practice some brush lettering on the labels. Okay, not exactly practice, but at least pick up the brush and do something with it. The “brush” was the other end of a Zig Scroll-and-Brush marker, or a Pentel color brush or a Copic brush. No guidelines, no do-overs, but it added a little fun to a tedious (and slightly alarming — how did all this stock accumulate?) chore.
I just returned from a week or so in Oregon, where I took a 2-day brush lettering workshop with Carol DuBosch and then toured around Oregon.
As one calligrapher in a town which contains two (and, in the past 25 years, has never contained more than about five at any one time), it was simply amazing to me to sit in a classroom in a sold-out calligraphy workshop with 23 local calligraphy students. Sure, I’ve sat in a class of 20+ calligraphy students before, but they’ve always been a collection from around the state or around the country or even around the world — a Florida retreat, or a week at Camp Cheerio or a class at the annual international calligraphy conference. I had lunch with a pediatrician who was taking this annual brush lettering workshop for the second time; she has taken weekly calligraphy lessons for several years (ten? or was that someone else in the workshop?). Imagine. I’ve had exactly one opportunity to take weekly calligraphy lessons, and that was in 1988-89. And then Beth McKee, my first long-term calligraphy teacher, who had arrived from Ottawa to spend the school year here, took off for Bangladesh, and that was that. From then on out — except for a year of 2-day class meetings to which I drove 3 hours each way each month — my education has been a series of trips to learn from quite famous calligraphy teachers for a week here and a week there.
My education compares to the education of Portland students as an annual gourmet meal compares to weekly community potluck. My meals may be exotic and glamorous, but theirs have been healthier, more regular and filling. Not that I’m knocking my exotic, glamorous meals. Still.
It’s been very, very hectic here. This semester I’m taking Figure Drawing and LoFi Video. Both fun, but the scheduled is doubled up, so it will be a sprint for the next 5 weeks.
This piece (detail doesn’t include personalization stuff at the bottom) is almost finished. Frustratingly, I discovered that the last name of two of the parents (shown here blurred around the circle) was misspelled as sent to me. Aargh. I’m waiting for an absolutely completely dry correction and the intestinal fortitude to take the knife to it.