A Garden of Letters

Dear Followers,

Looking for something to do in Canberra during October then visit our fellow calligraphy society's exhibition.

The Canberra Calligraphy Society presents "A Garden of Letters"

Wednesday 2 October to Sunday 27 October

Open to the public 9.30 am – 4.30 pm daily during this period

Exhibition Venue

Visitor Centre, Australian National Botanic Gardens

Clunies Ross Street, Canberra

Double Pencils in February

Dear Followers,

Life to seems to take over at times and while I have been busy calligraphically, I haven't seemed to be able to find time to write about it. So to remedy that, I am going to copy my posts from Calligraphy Southscribes blog http://calligraphysouthscribes.blogspot.com/ to my own blog as it is still my own writing. So here goes.

The first Calliarts at Southscribes, for the year was Double Pencils with Gloria. Personally I am always perplexed with double pencils as I can never seem able to join the lines together to create that three dimensional affect that you are looking for but judging by the number of people who attended the afternoon it is a popular lettering form. Gloria started the afternoon by explaining the basic knowledge required to create a successful piece of lettering with double pencils; this included how to join the two pencils together, the correct position to hold the pencils in and what techniques to use to enable the creation of larger or smaller letters.

 
After a quick coffee break it was back to work, at which time Gloria supplied an exemplar of a style of gothic lettering created using double pencils. We worked our way through the alphabet and then some of us chose one letter to work on, allowing us to create a finished piece. I had chosen an ‘M’ to use as a decoration for a card I had created. Gloria had kindly brought in lots of wrapping and handmade paper that was at our disposal to draw our letters onto and some excellent results ensued. What I imagined to be an afternoon of double trouble turned out to be double the fun.

Alive and Kicking

Well you would think that I hadn't anything to write about or been doing nothing to interest anyone when in fact the reverse is the truth.
May was interesting with a workshop completed on Modern Calligraphy. The local community college ran a workshop on Modern Calligraphy which seems to be all the craze. Our calligraphy group is always being asked to run workshops on it or is there anyone who will do commissioned work in Calligraphy but they mean Modern Calligraphy. Thus with this in mind I decided to take myself off to the course. Of course being a classically trained calligrapher I would say that the calligraphy was more lettering than calligraphy and because of my training found it difficult to forget all the rules I had learnt. No 'x' height, no interlinear space, no pen angles, etc. which took some getting use to but by the end of the afternoon I was getting use to the concepts. I wouldn't say it was easy and thought it more brush lettering than calligraphy. Lots more practice needed from this calligrapher!

Later in the month a friend and I were off to Menai Library to promote the Art of Calligraphy. The library is keen to promote different types of arts and contacted our group Calligraphy Southscribes to see if anyone was interested in coming along to do hold an informal class. It class was a mixture of ages and there was a great turn out with about twenty people.

Emanuel Phillips Fox

Dear Readers,

My favourite artist is Australian Emanuel Phillip Fox. He is classified as being in the impressionist style but whichever period he belonged to his artwork is exquisite.

It is birthday today (being born in 1865) so I just had to share a painting posted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

 

https://twitter.com/ArtGalleryofNSW?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Retro Art Deco Workshop - Saturday

The long weekend in October was spent at my calligraphy society's hall participating in a two day workshop run by Gemma Black called 'Retro Deco'.
We started on the Saturday with a short history of the period and Charles Rennie Mackintosh before Gemma did a demonstration of the lettering inspired by the period and Charles. We were then let loose on pencil and paper so we could learn the bones of the letters and how to build them up. Finally it was on to paper and ink.
After lunch we chose a short piece of writing that we had brought along, sourced from the period, mine was five words in length and from the Australian artist Hilda Rix Nicholas - "We are really truly here". We had to stack the words on top of each other. I did a practice run and then did the real thing on a pieces of rough watercolour paper. Once we were happy with the finished lettering, we then had to do some artwork to match the words.

The owl and the heiress: The life of one book over six centuries

I subscribe to the State Library of Victoria's newsletter, in which they have some great articles and one of those articles was on a book.
The book in question is an edition of the Liber de vita ac moribus philosophorum poetarum veterum (The lives and manners of the ancient philosophers and poets). It was printed in 1479 by Frederick Creussner in Nuremberg, Germany, one of the first great centres of printing.

The article is very interesting and well worth a read.

https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/our-stories/the-owl-and-the-heiress-the-life-of-one-book-over-six-centuries/

August Is a Calligraphy Month for Me.

Don't you love it when your month is going to be busy with calligraphic days?

August looks like is going to be one for me, I am off to two workshops and am also having a group of ladies over for my monthly calligraphy get together.

Calligraphy Southscribes, Inc. are presenting the two workshops so I'm sure if you are interested they could squeeze you in. http://calligraphysouthscribes.blogspot.com.au/

The first is Ruling Pens:

Ruling pens are wonderful calligraphic tools to experiment with, this afternoon we will be exploring the various lines and letter forms that be achieved in contemporary calligraphy.
Cost $10.00 with Helen Warren on 12 August 2017.

 The second one is Ronde with Pointed Pen:

Ronde, sometimes referred to as French Ronde, was used in France in the 17^th Century. 

We will commence the workshop using a traditional broad-edged nib. It is also planned that participants will make a small box, or at least start one, which will be decorated with the script.  $45.00 with  Glenis Sheather.

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to these workshops is because I'm not the tutor, I can sit back and just enjoy pen on paper and creating beautiful letters. I hope.