{"id":1227,"date":"2015-06-10T10:24:21","date_gmt":"2015-06-10T17:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2016-08-04T07:57:42","modified_gmt":"2016-08-04T14:57:42","slug":"italic-through-the-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/10\/italic-through-the-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Italic through the years"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Italic<\/a>
Italic through the years – 1984 through the present<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last month I was commissioned to write out the Kipling poem “If”. Since 1983 I believe I’ve written this poem out at least once every other year. I don’t always keep an image of the poem, but I do have 3 images here, from 2002, 2007 and 2015. (You can click on the image for a closer look.) I usually do the poem\u00a0in italic, for several reasons. First, it is very long and so I choose something that flows easily\u00a0from the pen. Second, it is very long and yet people do want to have it framed; so the lettering must be fairly small. Third, even though, and especially because, it is very\u00a0long, people want maximum legibility. Fourth, a compressed hand is better than a wider hand because two\u00a0columns of two\u00a0verses each makes for a good standard frame proportion. Fifth,\u00a0even though I think a book hand would be a good choice of lettering style, most people don’t think of book hand as “calligraphy”. {sigh}<\/p>\n

That 1984 hand running up the left side looks pretty damn good for someone who had been lettering for less than\u00a02\u00a0years. The 2002 version of the first verse looks a lot less attractive. The lettering was much smaller, the paper more difficult for me at the time, the slant was clearly problematic, and I think the stress of getting all that text down on a page with consistency and without errors was still a challenge. In 2007, I was in art school and not doing much lettering, and it shows. In the 2015 version, I spent a good deal of time trying out inks on the paper (see here<\/a>), and still … my consistency could be improved.<\/p>\n

Looking at this montage of lettering from 1984-2015, it’s not particularly clear that I’ve progressed, even though I’ve got to think I’ve learned something<\/em> in the intervening years. I’m reminded of the a quotation (which I can’t find now) that goes something like: “What is learned after the age of 40 can’t be communicated.” Truth or comforting fiction?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month I was commissioned to write out the Kipling poem “If”. Since 1983 I believe I’ve written this poem out at least once every other year. I don’t always keep an image of the poem, but I do have 3 images here, from 2002, 2007 and 2015. (You can click on the image for … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Italic through the years”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lettering","tag-italic"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bHT3-jN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/callibeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}