Today’s daily lettering — a quotation about inspiration by Heloise.
A cool desk — plans
I like this desk, which creator Kirsten Camara calls an Analog Memory Desk. (Click on the image to get plans for the desk.)
It reminds me of this scroll book that I made in Michael Jacobs’ class. It has a nice little wrapper that is not shown. I’d like to make another of these, with more substantial scroll posts.
The desk also reminds me of the Fisher Price music box TV that one of my younger siblings had.
Fishbone Fold Book
At yesterday’s meeting of our local calligraphy guild, Bridger Mountain Scribes, I led a tutorial on the fishbone fold, invented by Hedi Kyle. Despite having finally figured it out earlier that morning (!), it went smoothly. I followed the fishbone variation tutorial that Alisa Golden published on her blog, Making Handmade Books.
As I understand it, the standard fishbone has a stepped-out fore-edge; in this variation, the fore-edges are all the same width from the spine … ideally.
At the close of the tutorial, we each had a 3″ x 3-1/2″ text block of Arches Text Wove and a black pastel paper cover; end papers could be added at home. Even though we had measured a spine based on the width of the text block, the book did not close nicely and the glue stick (this was tutorial, remember) did not adhere the pastel paper cover well.
I returned to the studio and kept looking at the model I had made during the tutorial. I love Arches Text Wove, and this book block called out for some yummy black lettering. I did that. I decided to replace the paper cover with a cloth-covered board cover. This helped the book to close, but didn’t altogether solve the problem. So I added a bone closure.
Now it had a book shape. I lettered in black sumi and watered-down white gouache on black paper and trimmed those down for end papers.
I like it.
Freudian slip
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
Lettering on tricot nylon/ spandex — not the easiest substrate — with Zig markers: scroll, brush, and Writers. No planning, because it’s for a costume party this evening. And I had to come up with the content. Family commissions are often the most difficult of all.
(The asterisk is a small tribute to Kurt Vonnegut.)
Yale University’s Traveling Scriptorium
Yale University has put together a teaching kit that travels to classrooms on Yale’s campus to “support the study of the medieval and early modern book as material artifact”. What a great idea!
We can benefit too, if only virtually. Their blog archive addresses such topics as pigment manufacturing process, bookbinding terms and models, and the online version of their ink and pigment sampler is interesting, as is the online version of their leather and parchment sample set. There is also a PDF of medieval ink and pigment recipes.
Lemons into lemonade
My daily lettering earlier this week was pretty uninspiring. I had been trying all kinds of gouache tints with various mark-making tools, all on a big sheet of black Arches Cover. It was a mess. I often tell myself this is a good piece of the collage bin. This time I cut out as many 2″ x 4″ windows as I could find on the piece and assembled it into this flag book.
The photo still has a slight purple cast to it, but nothing like the electric blue cast it had straight out of the camera.
Cover boards are wrapped in old scraps of amateur homemade book cloth — made a long time ago, before I convinced myself not to use synthetic fabric. I painted the end papers when I couldn’t find anything that looked right. The book is propped up on the book box I made of more Arches Cover and off cuts of the lettering practice. Renaissance wax on the book box doesn’t seem to have been a great choice, but I may try adding another couple of layers later.
Quotation – gratitude or pride
Our local calligraphy group here has been choosing a quotation a month from ten qualities that make up what Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson calls a “joy portfolio,” helping to build resilience in the face of hardship:
- Joy
- Gratitude
- Serenity
- Interest
- Hope
- Pride
- Amusement
- Inspiration
- Awe
- Love
We’re at month 8 (or 9, I’ve confused myself as to whether the numbers represent work months or due dates), and I’ve only got a couple of completed. So this month I going to attempt to finish all the unfinished quotations.
I had thought to use the quotation below for “gratitude,” but I’m having trouble finding a quotation I like for “pride,” and this might work for that. I double that either of these is the final version, although they are the 3rd and 4th versions if you count the plain-white-background version as a 2nd version. The backgrounds are scans of watercolor studies (or, if not study, serendipity) that I’ve painted in the past. Maybe I’ll post the 1st version, which was as much finished thumbnail as a draft. So much for progress: I still don’t have a finished piece.
Brian Dettmer on Ted Talks
Brian Dettmer has an interesting take on the current role of books. He talks of the book as a body, a tool, a machine, a landscape. He makes an interesting book is not the best format for non-linear information; digital media does that better. He says that just as photography allowed painting to quit its day job, now that most of our information is stored in digital form, the book is becoming something new.
But watch it yourself:
Exemplar as an exercise in humility
Developing an exemplar is one of the most humbling exercises that a calligrapher can undertake. Having spent hours on this one, a number of thoughts tumble (my original typo “thumble” seems apt) through my head, in no particular order:
- In most of my work I usually choose Roman capitals to go with italic minuscules, and it shows here. Which leads me to the specific note …
- G: pick an oval, won’t you? That G bears no resemblance to the C or O or Q.
- D: doesn’t have much base.
- U: there’s an awful lot of skinny in the connecting stroke.
- F: looks like it’s mid-jump on a pogo stick; that’s a paste-up error.
- M: has a heavy top left shoulder.
- W: has an awkward join on the right bottom corner; I’m usually better about that.
- Z: well, I don’t know what exactly, but the base is not straight and it looks wooden; perhaps I should have flattened the pen angle a bit more on the horizontals
- L: although I didn’t spend much time on kerning, the L is noticeably too close to the M. It’s all crowded but I wanted them as large as possible but still fitting on a letter-size page.
- J: also wooden, except where it’s wavy when it shouldn’t be.
Sigh. Well, I do like the P and R … That leaves only 24 letters that need work.
I used a partially dried-out 5mm Zig marker so that students can see how the letters are being made.
Stanford online course: “Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts”
I’ve finished week five of this six-week online course, I’m thoroughly enjoying the class. I’ve picked up a lot of this information piecemeal over the past 30 years or so, but it is helpful to see it knit into a shape, so to speak.
I’ve discovered some helpful resources in the course of this course … of course. I had never seen these manuscript aggregators which the Stanford faculty have provided in the glossary:
- Manuscripts Online – www.manuscriptsonline.org
This has a nifty slider bar which allows you to choose a date range. You can also search by terms, and they’ve provided some Old English letters to cut and paste, which is a convenience. - The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) – www.mesa-medieval.org/about/
One can go to Manuscript Studies and start drilling down. A date range would be immeasurably more useful than date, and not very difficult to implement. (I could do it, and that’s saying a lot because I’m a rather pathetic programmer.)
For finding manuscripts in person, this very cool map shows a lot of worldwide depositories.
At the end of each week’s lessons, a medieval manuscript is provided as a transcription exercise. These have been a challenge. Helpful resources for transcription:
- For a lot of medieval alphabets:
Medieval Writing – medievalwriting.50megs.com/writing.htm
This outdated website has, nevertheless, invaluable information. This link takes you to and index of medieval scripts. Each page lists information about the medieval script, such as alphabet type, dates, locations, and functions. But the really valuable elements follow: an example of the script with a box below that displays the transcription as you hover. Even more valuable is the modern alphabet whose letters change on hover to the medieval script version of that letter. So incredibly helpful! - For Old English:
- Western Michigan University’s Medieval Institute Introduction to Old English, by Peter S. Baker, particularly Chapter 16.
- Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, where you can search for a word or look at an alphabetical list: A, Æ, B, C … T, Þ, U, … It even has a handy cut-and-paste option for æ and þ.
- For Latin:
- An online version of Capelli’s guide to Latin abbreviations
- Beginner’s Latin, courtesy of the UK National Archives.