Web Design project

We're starting an interesting project in my web design class. Groups of 4 people get together and agree on a basic narrative story and then each contribute 5 images that connect to the story. Then each person creates a website using the narrative and at least 1 image from each person in the group.

Our group narrative includes the following elements:

• going to sleep;
• a forest setting;
• a fish named Lord Elric and a turtle named Sam, recurring characters;
• being sent on a quest;
• eat something, get special powers;
• a monster or impossible situation;
• wake up, write dream down, link to other narratives.

Here are 4 of the images I'm sharing. I have no idea what the others will contribute; I hope these will work. The lettering looks so much better than it would have before I'd worked with lettering in Illustrator. I'm pleased with it.

This last image is my very first attempt (well, 2nd, but I had to trash the first one because of a basic minunderstanding about paths) to make a drawing in Adobe Illustrator. I've done quite a lot now with type and converted images, but had never started from scratch to make an image in Illustrator. It's a weird result, but I'm pleased that I was actually able to accomplish it.
As usual, click on the thumbnails for a closer view.

January 31 -- camera-ready invitation

Well, this is work, but it's also creative. I've been working on this camera-ready invitation for awhile now, and the time had come to finish it up, call it done, and send it in. So I did. And I'm much happier with it than I thought I'd be when I was working on it. I don't have a lot of confidence in my pointed pen work, and swashes are for the very experienced penman only. Well, I'm experienced. And when I compare this to some of the swashed pointed pen invitations I see, I'm brilliant. And then I compare this to the work of our present-day master penman, and ... well, that's the way of the world now, isn't it?

In today's global village it isn't possible fool oneself into thinking one is the best. On the other hand, we all have instant access to the very best models, which wasn't possible until the Internet.

January 29 - Thoreau redux

All right, here it is with the missing word and comma, and the last word corrected. (As usual, you can click on the thumbnail for a closer look.) I like it much better than yesterday's attempt. I tightened the line spacing in the main text area, which made the quotation block hang together better and allowed more space for the bottom text to sit in its own space. I also did the names at the bottom smaller (which you can't see, since I blurred them) and more condensed to make a more identifiable contrast between that and the quotation. And then I changed the flower to grow from the second half of the text rather than the first, so that each watercolor block is now connected to a block of text, rather than having both watercolor blocks connected to the first half of the text, and the second half of the text connected to ... nothing. And besides the fact the flowers now able to grow more vertically, the main flower points back into the text rather than pointing out of the frame. Now all I've got to do is find a place to write the attribution (maybe in the grass?) and pop it in the mat.

January 28 -- Thoreau quotation

This Thoreau quotation was commissioned as a wedding gift. So I've blurred out the names and date. I like the quote, and I think I like what I've done with it. I'll have to look at it awhile before I'm sure. The paper is Arches 70# hot-pressed watercolor paper. I don't know why the scan resulted in seemingly gray paper behind the bottom half of the quotation. And now I realize that I'm going to have to re-do it. The last word should be "wonders", not miracles. Oh well, it's a good first draft. I have a few things I want to change anyway.

January 24 -- Handwriting, continued

On January 24, I continued my survey of handwriting, this time a survey of my current handwriting with variations in spacing and writing utensils.

I've currently got two large chunks of work -- 450 certificates, 400 wedding invitations -- and this little divertissement was just what the doctor ordered.

January 23 - National Handwriting Day

In honor of National Handwriting Day, I've gone through various boxes of memorabilia to create a survey of my handwriting throughout the various stages of my life. I'm amused.

I like to say that I got into calligraphy out of sheer stubbornness: In elementary school the only subject in which I couldn't get an A was ... handwriting. I've been working on it ever since.

If you click on the thumbnail at left you'll see my handwriting at 5-1/2, 11, 16, 24, and 42. The big gap in there could possibly be filled only by locating the children's artwork with my explanatory labels on it; the years of rearing young children evidently didn't provide much free time for longhand.

Journal - January 22

I've got so much work at present, it's a pleasure to sit down and mix paints and doodle in my journal. I'm into the second signature of the journal. When I get a sufficient number of signatures done, I'll bind them. I'm looking forward to it.

Schmincke Calligraphy Gouaches are a real pleasure to letter with. These are three of the six colors I most often work with: vermilion red, ultramarine deep, and lemon yellow.

January 20 -- more than a Sunday drive

This weekend I hosted five high-school boys plus our own for a four-day meeting. I have been driving and driving and driving. And cooking. I am pleased to have done something creative every day during it all.
I got out some exemplars and worked on some new capitals before I started addressing the invitations ... there are 400 invitations to this wedding, so I'll be doing a lot of pointed pen work during the next couple of weeks. The x-height of these letters is about 1/8".

Journal - Friday, January 11

There is nothing more to be said about today.

January 10 - Pointed Pen Script

One day a year is inadequate for World Literary Day, so I'm continuing the theme today.

Pointed pen is not my first tool of choice in lettering. I've never had a class in pointed pen scripts -- copperplate, engrossing, Spencerian, business hand, etc. -- so what I know I've mostly picked up on my own ... and mostly from the folks in Ornamental Penmanship discussion group at Yahoo. The resources available there are simply incredible.

Broad-edged pens are more familiar to me. But I've just finished addressing 450 double-envelope wedding invitations in my own brand of pointed pen script, and it's starting to feel a little more comfortable than usual. The shoulder, now, that's not so comfortable at the moment ...

Journal - January 9

Today's post. Note the 11:47pm time, 13 minutes before midnight. Oh, the power of a deadline. The white in the italic calligraphy is the shine of still-wet gouache. I do like lettering with no guidelines every once in awhile. It's been a long, busy day.

World Literary Day

Some quotations in honor of World Literary Day. All done at 4 pen-widths high with a worn-out metal #3 Mitchell nib. (I have no idea why I hang onto these corroded, disgusting pens. Is it a sort of self-flagellation for the sin of neglecting to clean my pens properly? Scottish parsimony? I don't know.) All in gouache, except that the black is Moon Palace sumi ink.

The green drove me crazy, glopping off the pen -- you can see the unevenness in the close-up view. Since it was only the green that was a problem, I think it was the lemon yellow that was causing it, because the ultramarine and the touch of vermilion were fine in the other mixtures. Or perhaps it was the combination of the lemon yellow and ultramarine -- mixing them seems to me something like mixing low-fat milk and Kool-Aid.

I'm not recommending the color scheme! I'm still cleaning out old palettes -- more parsimony, perhaps, and the pleasure of exploring color in a serendipitous manner.

I can't remember what this paper is. It's something to do with printmaking -- very, very smooth and more of an eggshell color than it looks here. Superfine Letterpress, perhaps?

First Day of School

It's another new beginning today: the first day of school.

I had thought to make naive letter forms, and partially succeeded. I failed mostly in that I could not bring myself to abandon the Roman capital proportions, and thoughtlessly (without thought) kept the verticals more heavily weighted than the horizontals.

But I was more interested in making letters that were difficult, awkward to make, required thought, were not automatic. In this I succeeded: I worked to keep the pen angle at 90 degrees to the stroke, which required a constant change of pen angle to the writing line. Very awkward to do.

Epiphany

A quotation from Milton about epiphanies, on this day of Epiphany.

The red blob at the bottom of the page was the first mark on the paper, made when I leaned over to look past the board and my brush, held at the ready, connected with the paper in a most untimely manner. This is a signature of my journal, though, and so I continued on from that inauspicious first mark.

The illustration came from who-knows-where. I don't know who the woman might be, or what the broom-like appendage signifies. That's creativity for ya, eh?

Journal - January 5

I'm reading The War of Art, by Steven Pressberg. It's an empowering book, although I sometimes wonder at the pugilistic tone. The left side of the journal spread is a quotation from that book, about Somerset Maugham. The right side uses up the gouache that remained in a mysterious color palette that I don't remember at all.

The Alphabet, Improvised

Doodling on a grid. Done with Moon Palace sumi ink and a #4 Mitchell dip pen, except that the bottom two rows were done with an 01 Zig Millennium marker.

Black Tie Exchange

Finally ... something calligraphic!!

Here are the 4 envelopes I mailed yesterday for the Black Tie Exchange over at the Yahoo group, Calligraphy Exchange. The rules: Use a black envelope and either white or gold "ink" address in calligraphy.

I made my envelopes out of Strathmore Artagain black paper -- comes in a 9" x 12" pad. The two insert square are on Arches cover black, I think. I used my favorite gold ink -- Dr. Martin's Copper Plate Gold.

Names and addresses blurred to protect the innocent.

As usual, click on the image for a closer look.

Client work

This business of catching up after a trip is the pits. I'm close to being caught up. Here's a broadside and book for a client -- same quote for each. The inset in the 2nd photo shows the book closed.

I've been addressing invitations, and using hot glue and cardboard, but it seems like I haven't dealt with paint lately -- although that's not true, now that I think about it (I may post my Gandhi drawing later). Anyway, for whatever reason, I've been making beginner mistakes with paint -- getting it on my hands, in my hair, without realizing it ... generally being covered in paint for no good reason. Makes me feel kind of like a kid, though. That's not bad.

As usual, click on the thumbnails for a closer look.

Pointed Pen Sample

For K.,

A quick, cold, unretouched (except that I Photoshopped out the smudges made when I slapped it down on the scanner glass before it was dry) fake address in my current pointed pen script. My website is so out of date, even this quick one is a better sample.

Broad-edge script

I've been away on an of-my-gosh-school's-about-to-start-and- we've-got-one-more-opportunity-for-a family trip. Now I'm working on addressing wedding invitations. Here's a bit from the invitation itself:









Although I first thought I'd use a pointed-pen script for the addresses, after struggling through a few envelopes I quickly bowed to the necessities of the materials. The paper proved to be way too toothy and not at all sized enough to allow the use of a pointed pen.

I could include a rant here about wedding stationers and their high-priced unwritable stock -- even Crane has been known to make their envelopes inside-out at times, so that the sizing is on the useless inside of the envelope. Oh, the torture of having the beautiful side of the paper so close and yet so far away. It's like a tying up a horse within 5 inches' reach of water. All right, all right, I've just deleted the rest of this rant. Calligraphers know exactly whereof I speak, and the rest of you can only imagine our pain.

Anyway. On with my saga.

After I concluded that pointed pen was impossible for these envelopes, I started experimenting with a #5 Mitchell Roundhand nib -- a narrow broad-edge nib -- and tailored a script that I think complements the script above. Here it is (as always, click on the thumbnail for a closer view):

I began with a standard italic, and then made changes so that it more closely resembles a pointed-pen script such as Copperplate. I used the same lining guide I had set up for the original pointed-pen script, and this had the effect of a) making very small lower-case letters, b) enlarging the capitals in proportion to the lower-case letters, and c) slanting the lettering from the usual italic 5-15 degrees to about 40 degrees.

Then I modified the capitals to follow Copperplate forms a little more closely. See the B, the T's and the F's. This modification worked because the capitals are so tall: 11 pen-widths.

The x-height is 3 pen-widths tall, which necessitated a widening of the script.

And, voila! I like this script. I think I'll add it to my standard style offerings.