Calligraphy & more — the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
At our local guild meeting on Monday, Diana guided us through the designing and painting of a casual versal letter (or 4, in the case of one participant!). We had a lot of fun with pencil, pen, watercolor, and watercolor pencils. Here’s mine, at left. I began another; perhaps I’ll post it when I finish it.
I dug out an old paste-painted paper that seemed appropriate for this Rumi poem. No planning, which left me with no margins. No guidelines, except that the paper is a laid paper. I like working without a net sometimes, and I decided to do this the same day I gave it, so it’s not like I had a choice, is it? The surface was somewhat plastic-y where the paint was thick, and therefore a little difficult to write on with a #4 Mitchell nib.
This week in the bookhand class I’m teaching, we talked about layout and copy-fitting strategies. One strategy is to write the quotation, cut up the lines and rearrange them to fit the space allotted. I did the first part here:
I didn’t actually cut up the lettering, but I did measure the lines and begin each line based on those measurements. I did a series of cards based on the one Proust quotation. As shown below, I can get very different looks using the pen and the same basic centered layout. What I’ve changed: writing fluid, ground (paper), line leading. In a couple of cases I wrote the lettering with no guidelines, and so the x-height and line leading are also variable. Also in a couple of cases, I wrote “bloom” instead of “blossom.” Oops.
I’m back at work after the annual calligraphy conference and 4th of July celebrations. I’ll be posting about the conference soon.
I always try to do the homework I’ve assigned. In this bookhand calligraphy class, part of the homework this week is to do work with the following specific intentions:
In the above 2 examples, my intentions were roughly as follows (I should have made notes — and let that be a lesson to you students!):
It’s hard to switch from compressed to expanded without warming up. I also noticed that once I expanded the width of the letters I had to fight to keep the pen angle as steep as it had been for the compressed lettering.
Of all the major hands, I’m least confident about blackletter. This is copyfitting and practice for a personal project.
Bookhand doesn’t have to be boring. I like the simplicity of it, and the rigor.
Got to keep ahead of the students, you know. Text by unknown of author, as is often the case with internet memes.
Very poorly shot.
I’m teaching a calligraphy class this summer in Bozeman. The subject: bookhand. I didn’t want to teach the standard Johnstonian bookhand, which seems dated and, well, English. So I’m teaching a pared-down bookhand which uses the same proportions of Johnston’s foundational hand and Humanist bookhand, but has no serifs to speak of.
I’ve assigned homework, but of course I must do the homework myself so I can talk about the problems and pitfalls of the hand as well as the problems and pitfalls of practicing. I’m learning / remembering.
Calculating a 4 pen-widths x-height with a #3 nib … that comes to 6mm (4 x 1.5mm manufacturing spec). But my nib must have been customized as some point, because 4 pen-widths actually came to 5mm. So that’s what I used.