Calligraphy & more — the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
… the pianist will play at something else. At a 6-hour stage rehearsal of “Kiss Me, Kate” the other night, I was happy to have brought along a package of Fudebiyori metallic brush pens (straight out of the mailbox) and a pad of Strathmore Artagain paper. The metallic sheen is fairly subtle in person, but not as subtle as this shows it to be. The colors look great on black.
Last week I had some fun lettering on a few rocks I had picked up in the yard. The few accounts I had read by people about this seemed to indicate that it was difficult. It’s not. It’s actually rather … I was going to say “absorbing” but that would be silly. It’s true that if I didn’t mix the gouache thick enough, a line of dark appeared around each letter; this disappeared as the fluid dried. Rocks are actually quite lovely to write on. I tried sumi ink (Moon Palace), gold ink (Spectralite), gold watercolors (pans), white ink (Dr. Martin’s), and gouache (Schmincke mixed with either extra gum arabic or glair; I didn’t keep track of which container was which). They were all lovely to work with.
I had a good time this weekend making awls for my students from a bag of sponge brushes and a paper of doll needles. The red duck tape should find it easy to find them in the studio 🙂
Here’s what I did, step by step:
Steps 4 and 5 aren’t necessary, but the duck tape adds a nice finishing touch, I think.
I was going to remove the foam brush heads from each one, but then I decided hey! it can be a double-duty tool. When the foam brush is spent, you can either unscrew it and have a straight-up awl, or you can replace the brush head. Rather ingenious, if I say it myself.
While my go-to tools are metal calligraphy nibs (Mitchell, Brause, Tape) and gouache, sometimes a gold metallic gel pen can be a real pleasure .. and, sometimes more important, a portable one.
One time I ordered about 8 different gold metallic gel pens from Jetpens and had a field day testing them. Jetpens carries a whole bunch of writing tools and papers which are mostly geared toward the illustrators, manga artists, and crafters. They also provide comparative information about some of their tools and materials. Their guide to bottled white inks arrived in today’s email inbox. They compare opacity, reactivity, viscosity, water resistance, and nib compatibility.
Notably missing from the lineup for me:
It started out as a full-court press to organize my studio, but was soon upgraded to play.
Lots of projects going these days.
Today members of our local guild bound a test text block for the collaborative book we’ve been working on. We are making a standard case binding using the same paper on which the book will be printed. Today we got as far as applying the mull to the spine. I had brought supplies for this, and I was determined to unpack it all when I got back to my studio. This led eventually to trimming the text block and applying a headband. You can just see that text block underneath the top black square of paper. I did go ahead and cut out the cover and spine boards, but that’s for another day, because I continued to work on …
Addressing styles. I had the best time addressing some personal envelopes recently and discovered that I don’t really need guidelines for certain styles. So I’ve been developing some more casual envelope address styles. Some of what I tried today is shown above: sumi ink, pigment ink, gold gel pen, and fine marker on white, black and shimmery gold stock.
Yesterday I got out two travel watercolor sets and made test cards using a water brush. At the tops of the cards are the pure colors. At the bottoms of the cards I’ve experimented with mixing and tints.
After a week of cleaning my studio, there are still islands of disorder — small islands, in some cases. One of these is a box of Pilot Parallel Pens in various states of construction and usability. I really like these pens, but because I mostly use sumi inks and gouache I don’t think to get them out much. Although they can only take free-flowing media, they are about as manipulable as any writing tool there is.
Here are some great resources for getting to really know Parallel Pens:
At the 2014 calligraphy conference in Dallas, Carol DuBosch demonstrated the then-brand-new radius-cut Parallel Pen. More product information here, including Carol’s alphabet made with the pen.
And this recipe for pen and brush cleaner comes from Mary Lawler via Alice Young’s blog.
Today’s SAT analogy: Experimenting is to finished calligraphy as the tip of the iceberg is to the iceberg. One of the things that Christopher Haanes focused on in the workshop was sharpness of writing. His description of the differences between Chinese and Japanese stick inks has changed my thinking about them. (Don’t get me started on how bottled sumi ink bears no relation to stick sumi ink.)
Before I did the poem I mentioned in a recent post, I got out a bunch of inks and tested them on the paper I planned to use. This took forever, but was an interesting exercise. Of course, all the information is only useful with that paper and that nib …
And then I took a break and had a good time with paints  left over from an earlier piece. It looks better in person.