DOMESTIKA COURSE – ENGLISH CALLIGRAPHY – JOINED UP WRITING!
Great steps forward today in the studio, continuing to work on Unit 3 of the course which deals with lowercase letters.
The lesson was called “Union of Lowercase.” Not sure if this is a correct technical term – the teacher is Spanish and the video was dubbed into English. Basically it means “joined up writing.” So I have advanced from Kindergarten to Primary School!
New materials and techniques
Paper
I wasn’t satisfied with how things went yesterday. I knew I had to use better paper than the printer paper, so I rummaged among my supplies and found this sketchbook.
Not specifically designed for pen and ink work but it seemed to be OK. It wasn’t as smooth as I’d have liked, but it seemed to take the ink quite well. For my final project I will probably use something else, but that’s a while off yet.
Nibs
The nib I was using yesterday was supposed to be a flexible one, but I couldn’t get it to do the thick and thin lines. I rummaged through my box of cheap mixed nibs from Amazon and picked another one at random.
I discovered that it had a reservoir fitted. This is a separate little piece of metal that clips on, and allows the nib to hold more ink.
Writing position
I had a suspicion that I wasn’t holding the pen at the correct angle previously. The nibs I tried were both scratchy. I went back to one of the early videos on the course and looked again at what the teacher said about our writing position, posture and pen angle. I was right in my suspicion, and taped the paper down onto the light panel at an angle, so that the nib would be parallel to the guidelines.
This way, the nib in its angled holder would be vertical, and my downstrokes would have the benefit of full contact between nib and paper.
Ink management
I found that scribbling off the excess ink onto scrap paper after dipping worked very well to produce a smoother and more consistent result.
Lesson 3 – Union of Lowercase
To begin our “joined up writing” practice, the teacher had us writing the word “minimum.” All the letters were at “X” height only, and it was a good exercise in spacing the letters correctly.
I got a bit carried away on my final line of the word “minimum” and added some extra – “miniminimum” haha! I was delighted to notice that the teacher had done much the same thing in her example! The letters are all very similar!
After this, we wrote the word “begonillas.” This is Spanish for “begonia.” The word had both risers and descenders.
Pangrams
Then we wrote what is known as a “pangram,” a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet. She chose the most famous one, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This not only gave us experience with every letter, and their spacing in a word, but also the spacing between words in a sentence.
I looked up pangrams and found some other fun ones:
My girl wove six dozen plaid jackets before she quit
Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag
A wizard’s job is to vex chumps quickly in fog
Brown jars prevented the mixture from freezing too quickly
How vexingly quick daft zebras jump
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs
I particularly like the last one. Should keep a girl going for a while, especially if the jugs are full!
“These are a few of my favourite things”
The final exercise was to write out some words – of favourite things, or perhaps names of cities or countries – anything that took our fancy. “Whiskers on kittens and warm woollen mittens…” I forgot to arrange my favourite things alphabetically as instructed.
I had a bit of a “whoopsy” as I took the piece off the light panel – I smudged it with my sleeve. Duh. Otherwise, not a bad effort for today, I think!
The alphabet
I can definitely see an improvement in my writing since yesterday. This may be partly due to the better materials, and improving my writing position. I also noticed that I had more rhythm and fluidity, which was probably helped by the above improvements, too. The teacher said it was important not to get hung up on all the letters being exactly identical (i.e. not all the “a’s” should look exactly the same ) – this wasn’t digital, but hand writing. She said the important thing was rhythm, and a pleasing arrangement with the spacing of the letters and words. There would always be slight variations, which gave it the human touch.
In the next unit we will be looking at capital letters.
