Calligraphy & more — the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
From a couple of days ago … trying out various metallic ink pens, including gel pens and ballpoint pens. Also, Nikko G and Zebra G nibs with Dr. Martin’s Spectralite gold ink formulated for airbrush work.
It’s difficult to type without the use of my left index finger. And that’s my excuse for the last few days’ silence here, although I’m still working daily on lettering.
I did this a few days ago, lost it, and just found it again today. More abstraction of the letter forms I’ve been using from Hans-Joachim Burgert’s book.
This is fairly small, a sheet torn from a 6″ x 8.5″ book of Canson Mi-Tientes paper, done with Luna metallic watercolors and a #6 Mitchell nib, I think.
Today was not a day for inspired lettering. But I showed up anyway. That’s what it’s all about (all hokey pokey aside). Maybe the muse will be there tomorrow when I show up. And I will show up.
Details of the crime: It was done by the C-2 Speedball nib with the White Schmincke Calligraphy Gouache on the black Artagain paper. The side crime was done by a Mitchell Roundhand #4 nib with Luna silver pan watercolor, mostly to make a comparison of coverage between white gouached and metallic watercolor.
I didn’t use any guidelines, but I did frame the text area using a Fons and Porter white fabric marking pencil, which I like for dark paper and painted backgrounds. The point stays sharp and the eraser that comes with it works well without damaging the paper. Not all of the 9″ x 12″ page is shown. I will eventually bind this folio into a notebook with other lettering trials.
A little materials testing, a little more abstraction …
Moving towards a two-dimensional , flat all-over pattern. I tried to keep the pen-angle, pen-width size, letter order and shape intact, abandoning word spacing and changing only the direction. Sometimes I broke the rules to preserve the texture, but sometimes the broken rules were inadvertent.
Continuing the abstraction, but changing the line by using a new tool: a brush. Looking at this again, I see that abstraction doesn’t want to stay. I seem to have drifted back towards legibility a little.
What a struggle an exemplar is, no matter how long the study! I struggled over this one for a ridiculous amount of time. Now I’d like to fix the bases of the p and the b, some widths, a slant, the height of the z, and so on.
Now’s it more work — not work, but play, difficult play. And a nice change from the italic exemplar over which I slaved most of today. There is nothing like making an exemplar to point up all the ways my lettering falls short!
I’m tempted to start again with another set of formal letters, but I may move on.
I’ve been continuing to re-read Burgert’s book, The Calligraphic Line. At the beginning, he writes that calligraphy is two-dimensional design using a limited set of symbols with a limiting set of rules. He discusses the spectrum of legibility -> abstract 2D design, and the concomitant spectrum of typography -> fine art. (Or something like that; I don’t have the book in front of me.)
Burgert provides a hittite heiroglyphics image as an illustration to go with his discussion of the leap from flowing oral language to written symbols. After reading this, I constructed an alphabet using elements of that hittite image. It was handy; another image could have done as well. This is the alphabet:
Using this alphabet, I wrote out a quotation following standard rules of typography, writing left to right in horizontal lines, paying attention to kerning, and so on.
It was interesting, but I wanted to push it further to abstract two-dimensional design. After one falst start, this was the next step:
I thought it was interesting. And then pushed it further along the abstraction spectrum:
, but was surprised at how little I had moved along the typography/abstraction spectrum between lettering 2 and lettering 3. So far, it’s fairly easy, so I probably haven’t gone far enough yet.
Fun stuff. I had a little setback today — dropped some parts in the snow between house and studio. I had to start over on them. Not a problem I ever had in Florida.
Yesterday’s daily lettering shown here is another all-over pattern of letters, done for a book I’ve been working on. The first image shows the lettering in it’s original form. Then today I Photoshopped it, adding a background image and some dimensional effects.
