The Artistic Way to �Stay in Touch
Week Three- Calligraphy and Handwriting
Show and Tell from Collage Class
Caroline’s flower pot went on to be hat for remote birthday party celebration
Jo sent in class doodle and Max did fantastic video of collage work using photos of Grandma’s time in the Navy
Roxanne made a poster template for folks in her condo to make art to share…
THEY DID!
Nancy’s Metamorphasis collages
Cheesman Sky Chickens
Sunshine after Covid
Let’s put Googly Eyes on EVERYTHING
thanks Brenda!
Walt Whitman Birthday Celebration
Mise en Place…
Getting ready to write
Think about how you sit when you write….
“A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind. The key to good technique is to keep your hands, feet, and hips straight and centered. If you are centered, you can move freely. The physical center is your belly; if your mind is set there as well, you are assured of victory in any endeavor.” Calligraphy and Akido
like any other type of exercise- do some warm up stretches
never roll your neck in a full circle
take breaks in your writing for stretches
your hands and fingers need a warm up too
if your writing is cramped, make sure you aren’t gripping too tightly
do breathing exercises too, don’t hold your breath when you write!
Some good rules of thumb
practice duplicating fonts and writing styles that are vertical before working on cursive
use lined paper and let letters take up two lines
tall letters start from the top and pull down
don’t use too much pressure
Let’s Practice!
Either work from the calligraphy practice sheets in the class resource section or grab a piece of paper and practice free hand- I often put a piece of lined stationary under my typing paper when writing just to help with spacing.
Take your time and draw (write) your print alphabet both upper and lower case taking time to let the letters hit the cap line at the top and ascender line at the bottom
Think about your natural letter shapes, how round are your “o”s and “a”s are the bars of your “t”s straigt? Do you like how that looks or do you want to tweak it?
Fancy
Easy on the eyes
Let’s draw that again, next time give an extra line to your vertical letters to beef them up and small crescent to your rounded letters ...
If you’re working with a calligraphy pen or brush pen the advice would be skinny part of pen for the thin lines and chiseled or fat edge for rounded parts
As we continue with the discussion today, try this alphabet again but this time with your cursive letters
photo of alphabet included here is for discussion purposes… there are LOTS of practice sheets available on the internet, especially on Pinterest
Recommended Books… with links!
Calligraphy, handwriting and lettering
Great resource with practice pages included!
Recommended Books… with links!
Calligraphy, handwriting and lettering
Exploration of modern lettering styles with Exercises for you to try
Using newer Ipads with electronic pencil and Procreate App is an expensive but rewarding way to practice Every-Tuesday has lots of free tutorials for pen on paper and ipad calligraphy practice
Find videos and downloads for fonts and styles you’d like to learn
Why we write the way we do...
Notable figures in the evolution of handwriting in the US
Platt Rogers Spencer- an abolitionist, Spencer intended to enter the seminary but his chronic alcoholism kept him from pursuing that path.
In 1832 he gave up drinking and helped to co-found a series of business colleges, publishing a series of manuals with a unified script style. These became the standard for legal documents and business correspondences through to the popularization of the typewriter in the 1920s.
A.N. Palmer
despite the backing of the educational book publishing industry, Palmer was able to make headway for his methods through the private school system first and then gain populuarity through the New York Public School system at the time of his death over 25 million Americans had studied his form of penmanship from biography
History of Handwriting Book in New York Times points out what happens when we write
Studies show that a child drawing a letter freehand activates the neurological centers that reading and writing do in adults, while using a keyboard produces little effect. Children composing text by hand generate more words more quickly, and also express more ideas. Students who take class notes by hand better retain that information, and, fascinatingly, not only does the brain process capital letters and lowercase letters differently, but block printing, cursive and typing each elicit distinctive neurological patterns.
a personal anecdote
1985
Our Lady of Fatima School
Propagation
By Bonnie Ferrill Roman
Handmade paper, wire, beeswax, pigment, matte medium, roving
Handwriting Analysis article in Reader’s Digest…
Willam Mariott- magician and de-bunker of mediums and Automatic Writing
Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language.[5] Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work, that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time.[6] Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work.
Futurists freeing words from contex https://www.pixartprinting.co.uk/blog/futurism-book-objects/
In the manifesto Destruction of Syntax–Wireless Imagination–Words-in-Freedom, Marinetti writes:
“I have initiated a typographical revolution directed against the bestial, nauseating sort of book that contains passéist poetry or verse à la D’Annunzio12—handmade paper that imitates models of the seventeenth century, festooned with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, decorative capitals in red ink with loops and squiggles, vegetables, mythological ribbons from missals, epigraphs, and Roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of Futurist thought […]. My revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page “.
“Paging through old letters exchanged with friends, we encounter a slightly less obscure person. We can remember the otherwise forgotten, the banal and the irritations of our daily lives. Why would we want to remember these things? Because it it the seemingly unexciting minutiae that makes up the bulk of everyday lives. When we examine old correspondence, we come upon a self that is no quite so much a mystery. A letter is evidence of our existence on this planet, and a tangible record of our relationship with another person
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