Calligraphy & more — the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
I came across a drawer full of these next to bone folders, awls, and other bookbinding tools. Does anybody know what this is?
Update: I posted this question to the Book-Arts-L and immediately got the answer: it’s a scalpel handle. So now I know. I just happen to have a scalpel blade.
The eight books that were due on Valentine’s Day were actually completed in time to arrive by the deadline. Yay! I’ll make two more for a series of 10. Usually I do an “edition” of manuscript books (if there is such a thing), but this time I’ve done a series instead. To my mind, the difference is that I didn’t try to make these books closer to identical. The painted pages are all different. But the text, which consists 8 haiku, are all the same.
Trying #2-1/2 Mitchell nib with a combination of Sumi ink and jet black gouache at an x-height of 4.8mm. partway through, I gave up on a nib that was cupping, and not much happier with the new one.
Oh, and the actual sign was “You can’t combover mysogyny.” What is mysogyny after all but a form of hypocrisy, anyway?
Today I had just 16 minutes available to work in my studio. This was it.
I could tell you about my day – the flood in the basement from the floor above, the anxiety over forgotten pre-travel chores, calls to doctors and pharmacists about vaccine/drug interactions, the manic last-minute changes to plans, etc. But I won’t do that because it will stress me out all over again.
And yet.
I had 16 minutes in my studio, and that was a very good thing.
Day 1 of this hand, these rules:
Thoughts:
It doesn’t flow well; it’s not yet in my kinetic knowledge. The sleeve of my jacket keeps impeding the smoothness of the long vertical strikes. The pen angle keeps creeping up. The s needs work (not unique to this hand!). I need to either tighten the word spacing or loosen the letter spacing. There is more. But this is enough to be going on with.
These 26 letters never get old.
Sifting through the flotsam of my studio, I found notes written on a plane from Amsterdam to Minneapolis in 2012.
This was the end of a trip to Eastern Europe, and I was looking forward to getting back to work in my studio. These lines were written in all caps. Not sure where the words came from, but they’re still relevant.
More from daily alphabets, as promised. The ink was going on the the brush pen I used for lettering the top alphabet, and then I picked up a full brush pen it for the lower alphabet. Strathmore Charcoal paper – so lovely for brush work.