Elmo van Slingerland (@lettertetter) is coming to teach Roman minuscules in Montana this September, and I’m in! It’s time to get my Roman minuscules groove on. I’ve begun a practice journal of 9.5″ x 12″ Strathmore Drawing 400 sections. Here are some of the first pages.
Mark Twain riffing on the Southern watermelon is one of my favorites. This is from his book Pudd’nhead Wilson. I have saved it since high school, I think, when I first read the book.
Watercolors and metal pen on Arches HP 90# watercolor paper. Text/image area: 8.5 in x 9 in.
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar entries are quoted at the top of each chapter, and some are quite harsh. Here’s one that I delighted in when I was young. “He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.” The book is a biting commentary on humanity, particularly the socio-racial times in which he lived. You can read it for free thanks to Gutenberg Press.
I haven’t done any watercolor in awhile, and am rather pleased with this simple watermelon. Yes, it’s lopsided, but then so are the best-tasting watermelons, in my experience.
I had some serious fun in a recent pointed-brush class with Yves Leterme this spring. Very serious. So often, classes in lettering concentrate on the individual letters, with some attention paid to letter- and word-spacing. These weird, wild letters needed attention and care, but the true challenge was in making them work together as a texture. This required some serious attention and difficult decisions. And this is work I need to be doing. So I will be continuing this for awhile.
Homework done in week 3 of the pointed brush class with Yves Leterme. The point of this exercise was to come up with as many symbols that read as “A”. Walnut ink and water brush on a fat 11 in x 14 in pad of drawing paper.More homework done in week 3. Here I experimented with as many different kinds of connections between pairs of letters as I could manage. Then I used that new “vocabulary” of connections to write the word.At the end of the first page of this exercise, I felt that I had a few more different “California”s in me.
If you want to check out work by others who took this class, search Instagram for #pointedbrushlettering. You can fairly easily tell which of those posts are related to Yves’ class.
This is the third online class I’ve taken with Yves. I took his class on Built-Up Capitals two years ago, which you may also remember from these posts here and here. I also took his Homegrown Trajans class four years ago, which was more serious fun.
His instruction is always interesting and his critiques are always helpful. I also like to look at his critiques of other students’ homework.
I believe I’ve mentioned before what a wonderful education venue Harvest provides as Acorn Arts.
Omnigatherum: A Lexiphanic Glossary for Catastrophic Times. 2 in x 2 in x 2in.
My latest artist book, Omnigatherum: A Lexiphanic Glossary for Catastrophic Times, continues my slight obsession with weird and wacky words. I’ve never posted photos of my latest artist book edition, completed December 2021. It’s time!
The text is a compendium of obscure words that each have a relationship to my experience of life during the pandemic. Many of these words are the ones I used last year in this broadside, which sold during the course of my solo exhibition in Missoula.
The box lid serves as a front cover for this inkjet-printed accordion that emerges and keeps emerging, for something like six feet of length, 2 inches at a time. The enclosing box is just 2 in x 2 in x 2in. Cloth-covered boards make up the box, and the accordion fold is giclee printed on Arches Text Laid paper. A stone bead serves as the handle on the box.
There are currently three books remaining in the edition. You can purchase one here.
A side view of Omnigatherum, partially unfolded.A view of the book mostly unfolded, together with another book completely closed in the box.
It’s been awhile! I didn’t realize how long. A road trip, a dead laptop, extensive house repairs … how the time flies. I have managed to get some calligraphy work done in those tiny cracks of time available. Here are few responses to a couple of the weekly prompts in an online calligraphy group:
Gouache on Fabriano Ingres paper.Another go at it. Gouache on Fabriano Ingres paper.My attempt at some literary nonsense. Pencil, paper.
Roman minuscules done in gouache with a 3mm Brause pen on Arches Text Laid. Text area 10 x 4 in.
I lettered this quotation by Charles Darwin on adaptability in Roman minuscules fairly quickly. There wasn’t much time for lettering this week.
I don’t have much to show for what I did do this past week. The 6-pound beef brisket cooked in 7 pounds of caramelized onions and the even larger quantity of spring vegetables are mostly gone. I didn’t even take a photo, even though it was gorgeous. Our fellow diners brought even more delicious things, and it’s been some time since I’ve eaten so well!
Regardless of the text shown above, this annual meal has not changed since 1995. That’s a good thing, too.
Blackwing pencil, lettering about 9 in wide, on mystery watercolor paper.
The Ben Shahn lettering continues! In a private Facebook group, the weekly prompt was “one word”. I chose “Nurture”. And because I have just finished teaching two online workshops titled “Ben Shahn-ish”, those letter forms are on the mind and in the hand.
This is not my first post about Ben Shahn-ish letters. You can read more here.
Palomino Blackwing pencil (black) on drawing paper. Text is 9 in wide.
Although I’m a little late, I didn’t want to miss commemorating National Pencil Day this year. It marks the day in 1858 when Hyman Lipman received US patent number 19,783, for the first pencil-eraser combination. And we all know how important the “other” end of the pencil is! Lipman also began the first envelope company in the US. Given the current state of envelopes in US (vis a vis actually writing on them with pen and ink), Lipman may be turning over in his grave. Nevertheless, we scriveners owe him a lot.
I love pencils, those non-leak, portable, low-stakes drawing tools that take up no room in the purse or luggage. Beyond National Pencil Day … If you read this blog regularly, you will know that I love pencils and have posted lots of pencil work over the years.
Hewing more closely to the rules of weathergrams, this is black and red, with a chop, in portrait format. I didn’t not include, however, a vermilion initial capital, as recommended.
It’s unseasonably warm for March in Bozeman. Ski season will end early, and the mud is just about everywhere. Earlier this month the trails on the 38 acres of Snowfill in the Bridger foothills mud and slush on top of slippery ice. My most exciting purchase lately has been a new spin mop 🙂 Time for some more weathergrams. You may remember this post, autumn before last, and this one a few weeks later, showing those weathergrams after they had weathered some.
These will, once again, be distributed throughout the trails in town. This one is almost out of date, but the memory of slippery mud is still fresh.
Weathergrams should be short, original insights, 8-10 words long. I did not follow that rule for these next ones, which are not my own words and are longer texts. If you wish to follow the suggested format, more guidance may found here in the form of Lloyd Reynolds’ book Weathergrams in PDF format.
These don’t follow the exact rules for weathergrams, but I like the freedom of the longer line length.
