Category Archives: Lettering

My lettering includes traditional broad-pen calligraphy, pointed and flat brush calligraphy, and drawn styles. My lettering may or may not be re-touched in Photoshop or by hand, and is sometimes refined in Adobe Illustrator.

Unfolding (and folding) Directions

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To follow up on the earlier post about folded calligraphy, here are three examples illustrating potential directions that the combination of calligraphy and folding can go:

We can do traditional origami, such as a frog design

or, we might use a more graphical, structural approach, say, for greeting cards, shadowboxes, and wall art

or, as in the example of the previous post, we can go with abstract sculptural approach

These are still just prototype examples, of course; I can see that there will be an art to be learned about where to put the calligraphy on the original unfolded paper if I want it to display best, but I’ve made no real effort to coordinate the placement with the folds at this point. And since I haven’t yet really decided what I might want to use this for, I don’t know if one of the three approaches is more relevant for me personally. Or maybe there are additional approaches I should consider. What do you think?

Pencil Gestures

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Last week I received my copy of Yves Leterme’s new book, Thoughtful Gestures, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying reading it. I met Yves a couple of years back when he was teaching a class at a Camp Cheerio Calligraphy Workshop (I was in the other class, taught by Denis Brown), and I really resonated with the work he was doing and the work his students were producing. So for the past week or so, I’ve been playing around with gestural writing, trying to get more of a free feel to my work. A lot of my practice has been with a pointed brush and sumi ink, but as usual when I’m playing with something new, I also have done a lot of pencil work. Here’s an example, using graphite and colored pencils:

Solitude

Yves talks a lot in his book about his process of working with gesso, and how he will often wash things off and re-work and paint over portions of the piece as it develops. In the piece above, I did something similar by overwriting, smudging, and erasing. I want to continue to experiment with this process, and try the gesso process as well. More to come, I hope.

Folded calligraphy

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A few days ago, in browsing the Roku for something interesting to watch, we happened across the documentary Between the Folds, by Vanessa Gould. This is a short film about the art and science of paper folding. I have played a little with origami in the past, but the level of skill and the intricacy of the patterns shown in this movie was so far beyond anything I had seen before that I felt an irresistible urge to pick up a sheet of paper and start folding.

As it happened, the closest sheet of paper to me was a piece of scrap paper on which I had been sketching ideas for a envelope design for my nephew Matt’s upcoming birthday (Happy Birthday, Matt!). I just started by making semi-random folds, not trying to create anything in particular, but folding the sheet into a fan pattern in one direction, then un-folding it and doing the same with the sheet turned 90 degrees, and finally, I started throwing in various folds that I remembered from simple origami patterns I had learned years ago. My main thought was just to create something with enough complexity of facets and textures that it might enhance or add interest to the calligraphy. Here’s a photo that suggests what can emerge from this process:

This was just a preliminary experiment, but the result intrigues me, and motivates me to want to learn more about the current state of the art in paper-folding. If any reader has had experience in combining calligraphy and folding, I’d be particularly interested in hearing from you!

Four keys

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The sketch below is essentially another callidoodle, as it’s just a cleaned-up version of a quick sketch done during Sunday’s church service. The lectionary passage for May 15 was the portion of Acts where Luke reports some of the key factors that led to the rapid growth of the early church following Pentecost:

Pastor Ramon pointed out, though, that none of the four items emphasized above are really “key” in the absence of the word “devoted.” It was because of constant, intense devotion to these four items that the community grew.

My usual doodling tools for the callidoodles are just a pencil and a fine-point black monoline pen, but it’s hard to do layered calligraphy in pure black and white. My original thought was not really to layer, so much as to intertwine the four key words, as you see in the words “Teaching” and “fellowship.” When I brought the sketch home and looked at it some more, though, I decided that there wasn’t enough separation of the words for legibility, so I added a half-tone for the word “bread” using a pencil. If I were to further develop this sketch into a more finished piece, I might run the sketch above across the bottom of the page, and then feature the word “Devotion” as an emphatic vertical element. I’ll have to think further about that.

Pencil Doodles

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I’ve been reading a couple of books on art and drawing technique, and spending some time each day sketching on my lap board. Most of these sketches are really just doodles, and I’ve been concentrating on particular patterns and technique, rather than making any real effort at design. But I’ve been finding that interesting designs are emerging nevertheless, with no particular effort or conscious thought on my part. The background of the sketch below started with my copying the design of a piece of molding from a photo I had taken in the chapel at Les Invalides in Paris (site of Napoleon’s tomb). Then I began adding random other elements, with no intention of creating a unified piece. But when I looked at the page, I felt it suggested a sense of the past, and I thought of  the lyrics to “Yesterday” as a set of text. The lettering style is just something I had been playing with recently, and wasn’t chosen for any special reason.

This actually violates one of my usual practices, in that I try to avoid using copyrighted text – but since I have no plans to sell this piece, perhaps the Beatles lawyers won’t come after me. The original sketch was just done on white inkjet paper. I scanned a piece of banana fiber paper and then overlaid the sketch in Photoshop to give it a little more texture, and more of a finished appearance.

The books I’ve been reading, by the way, are Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing with Imagination, and Trudy Friend’s Artist’s Complete Problem Solver.  Both are full of examples and suggested exercises – good resources for a person like myself with relatively little formal art training.

Zen stones revisted

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Some time ago, I made a post about “Image Seeking Word,” and asked for some thoughts about what words might be appropriate. During the Christmas season, someone who had seen the blog came to me and asked if I might make a customized version of that image for her son. She suggested that words like “Dream” and “Imagine” might be used, but asked that I pick some more of my own. Here’s what came out of that project:

The letters of the name of the recipient, “Jonathan,” are also sprinkled among the stones. Each word was written separately in black gouache, then scanned into Photoshop, and re-sized and warped to fit the contours of the stone, before finally being “etched” (using the Bevel and Emboss tools), so there’s a fair amount of work involved in using this many words, but I enjoyed it, and learned a lot in the process. I’ve since done a similar version, with a different name, for another customer.

I’d be interested in getting your feedback and further ideas about words for the image.

Play what’s not there

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As another example of pencil calligraphy, here’s a page from one of my journals, featuring a quote from Miles Davis:

Miles was one of my early jazz idols. I started playing the trumpet when I was about 8 years old, I think, and in my high school days played several hours a day. I continued to play through college in marching band, concert band, and orchestra, and even during my working career in engineering I continued to play in a jazz band at Bell Labs for many years. These days, I’m more of a several hours a month player, playing mostly seasonal special music for our church with one of my good friends.

Skilled calligraphers learn to do their lettering not just by looking at the forms of the letters themselves, but also looking at the “negative space” inside the letters and between the letters and words. I think this is something like what Miles Davis may have been saying in his quote – music isn’t just the notes, but it’s also the space between the notes, and the interpretation which can’t be written in musical notation.

The last week or so I’ve been thinking about yet another aspect of negative space and “what’s not there.” My mother has been in the hospital for cancer surgery, having had a large tumor removed, and while she seems to be recovering well, this has started me thinking about all that becomes missing in our lives as we age. Anita and I have each lost a parent in the past 9 years, and I’m now old enough that friends of many years are starting to exit the stage; one good friend succumbed to cancer this past October. I was thinking about how we keep all these people alive in our lives and our memories, and the quotation above came to mind – we have to “play what’s not there.” We mourn our losses, of course, but I think it’s much more important that we honor those we have lost by thinking of how they lived, and, when we can, acting as they would have acted and living as they taught us. If we keep our eye on those negative spaces as we draw our own lives, we can create a beautiful unity between what once was, and what still is, and what can be.

Seattle

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Our itinerary for the trip included flying into Seattle, spending the night and the next morning there, then moving on to Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, the Portland area, Crater Lake, and then returning up the Pacific Coast of Oregon. Since we were staying about three blocks from the Space Needle in Seattle, I had to get up early for some night shots of that. Here’s my favorite:

Those other-worldly pieces of metal framing the Needle are a nearby sculpture. This photo is what digital photographers would call a “High Dynamic Range” image – it’s made by blending one photo exposed for the sculpture with one exposed for the Space Needle. I made a number of photos from the top of the Space Needle on the return trip, but I’ll post those later.

The next morning before leaving for Mt. Rainier, we made a trip to Pike Place Market, where we stumbled across this delightful piece of calligraphy embedded in the asphalt near the main entrance:

I assume that the chop in the lower right corner is the name of the artist, but I can’t read it. If anyone knows what it says, please let me know so that I can credit the artist properly. I’d love to know who it is and see some other examples of his/her work.

Pike Place Market has something like 600 shops, and I’m not sure that counts all the fishmongers, flower merchants, produce stands and craftspeople who come and go. We were actually there before most of the retail shops opened, though, so we saw mostly the food and flowers. Here’s a brief taste:

We could easily have spent the day (or several days) there, but that was true of almost everywhere we visited during this trip. Next post: on to Mt. Rainier.

A larger collection of the photos from the trip will be available on my Flickr page.