Fall happenings on the road

It’s been a wonderfully busy fall. With the current batch of engraving finished and the garden put to bed, I’ve been able to get back into the studio. First, my week at Cheerio was once again absolutely.  John Stevens is both master artist and superb teacher.

 

 

 

 

From broad edged to pointed brush and some things in between. No pressure for completed masterpieces, just letters.  We made lockups and played with the brush as a design tool.  The steel nib has it’s place, but the freedom of the brush is a joy to experience.  The text is by Oscar Wilde:

Tread gently for she is near under the snow. Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow.

Quite sad and without his usual snarkiness.

The assignment to the left was to create one word with the pointed brush.  Then to place some smaller text below it.  It was hard to choose a word that didn’t have any specific meaning – but Sheldon’s Bazinga seemed to fit the bill and why not pair it with a bit of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

Even though the size is varied, this was all done with the same brush – a Kalish No. 3 Red Sable.

The brush a design tool is amazing.  Even if you eventually used a different writing instrument, what other allows you this flexibility of size, shape, and weight with just one tool.

 

Back in the Saddle Again

I have been remiss in posting the past few weeks.  I won’t bore you with all the details except to say that it involved both a marvelous week with our granddaughter Alex and spending some time gathering photographs and typing information for entries to LAR.  I’m still knee deep in engraving, but taking time in both the studio and the garden is good for the soul.  Here are a few things I’ve been working on.

I’ve been experimenting with water-soluble pencils, including the
Derwent graphite and watercolor.  The result is intriguing and has lots of possibilities.

Using blind writing as a resist, watercolors with only one or two pigments, and letter shapes as background give this a depth that’s hard to achieve with a paste paper background. I work in layers allowing one to dry before adding the next.  I love Daniel Smith paints and use them almost exclusively now. I like that you can buy watercolors, acrylics and printmaking inks all in the same color ranges.  The piece to the right uses wax pencil, watercolor and gouache on Arches text wove.

BTW, here’s a little studio tip I gleaned from friends at Cheerio – add a bit of Dr. Martin’s Bleedproof White to your white gouache (I usually use W&N permanent white) and it will pop out better on that background.  I also always decant my whites into a second container, even though I try to reserve a few nibs just for white, you never know when your pen might have a bit of color left in it; no point in ruining a whole bottle of Dr. Martin’s with a random bit of gouache or watercolor.

And lastly, if you’re looking for some end of summer reading material, you might check out Free Play, Inspiration in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch.  It won’t make practicing those letter forms any easier, but you’ll find lots of reasons to play while you practice.  You can never tell when one of those “happy accidents” might grace your page.

 

Art Every Day

For me one challenge after a workshop is making the techniques my own. We’ve all been to galleries where the artist’s inspiration is so evident in his or her work that you immediately conjure up the name of the inspiring art.  While it’s fun to come home and repeat what one has learned, eventually it’s more important to allow the art to speak through you and not someone else.

 

That’s what set Laurie Doctor’s workshop at Cheerio apart. Through a series of exercises and readings, she invited us to reach inside and pull out our own thoughts and ideas.  She also challenged us to write or draw every day.

 

From her inspiration, I made the three previously posted small 5×7 coptic bound books and have been making a conscientious effort to use them daily.

 

 

The photos here represent a few of the ideas that manifested themselves when I was able to put aside the worries of a “finished product” and just play.

Two More Sketchbooks

Just finished binding two more sketchbooks.  I’d intended to make two books, but I’d covered the boards first and then when I gathered the signatures, I didn’t like the color combination.

So I went back into the paper stack and covered new boards in black and white for the already gathered signatures. While the new boards dried, I chose more papers for signatures in the horizontally stitched book.  This time I used Arches MBM and Bugra (camel) paper with more blank pages which should make the horizontal book a little more watercolor friendly.

 

It’s fun, easy and I have no reason now to skip daily drawing and writing.

Random Papers and a Coptic Sketchbook

Here’s something to do with all those papers that aren’t quite frameable art, but way too wonderful to toss away. The paper is Arches velin (text wove). Using watercolor, pencils, china marker and sumi, I’d made quite a collection of paper. Using precut Davey board from John Neal Books (5×7), I covered them using one of the half sheet papers.  The inner signatures are made using the decorated papers, plain Arches text, and black Hahmemule ingres.  Bound with a Coptic stitch using black book thread, I now have a small sketchbook to carry with me. You can find Youtube video  instructions online in several places for the coptic stitch. 

 

Thanks to Laurie Doctor for sharing her wonderful sketchbooks with us at Cheerio and spurring me to create some of my own. I promise to post some of the pages when I’ve added to them.

Weekend with Denis Brown

 

I had the great fortune of spending the weekend at Annie Cicales’s in Fairland, North Carolina with six other calligraphers studying all the ins and outs of working on vellum.  We began with wonderful slunk (fetal or stillborn) calf skins hand chosen by Denis for us from Ireland.  Then from cutting, sanding and sandarac to writing materials, backing papers and finally stretching and mounting, we each produced delightful 5×8 pieces.

 

It was an amazing three days of work interspersed with video presentations by Denis where we marveled at both the diversity of his work and the myriad ways he’s incorporated calfskin into the most contemporary of calligraphic work.  Many thanks are owed to both Manny Murillo and Annie Cicale for all their hard work arranging and hosting us.

Sigh! Cheerio is over too soon.

 

We opened each morning with marks made in Sumi and the walnut ink. The marks were made with a large brush and with our eyes closed. David was the first to add a spontaneous and brilliant splat to his mark, but I don’t think Beth is going to forget how her “happy moment” with the walnut ink baptized us on the other side of the table.The papers were left on the table each day for us to annotate as we saw fit.

Billy was a master monitor in making sure we didn’t forget to add our bit to each of the sheets as the day went on.  We weren’t quite sure what we would do with them today, but to our wondrous surprise he and Joyce hung them from the rafters and we closed our week by each cutting a section to take home.

Here is a view of one of the four sections still hanging but after we removed our bits.  Quite fun to see the results of our spontaneous marks.

So ends another wonderful week in calligraphic paradise.  Back in September to wrestle with the pointed brush under the masterful tutelage of John Stevens.

Cheerio Days Two and Three

We’ve been busy bees here in God’s country.  Lots of wonderful writing.  Watercolor backgrounds from palettes of three colors. Writing with different tools and materials.  Here are two of my own that have reached a reasonable state of completion. Now back to work!

Cheerio Day One

First day and what fun we’ve had.  Blind contour writing and color mixing with lots of exercises involving sumi ink, graphite pencils and watercolor.  This photo was taken at the end of the day and represents blind writing of an early Greek alphabet and colors developed from a simple palette of Daniel Smith watercolors – quinacrodone gold, quinacrodone coral and phalo blue (RS).  Finding all those mysterious browns and grays was both challenging and wondrous.

Acrylic Mediums

 Back to the studio.  This week I’ve been working with acrylic mediums.  For those who aren’t familiar with acrylics, the various gels, pastes and liquid mediums allow for shapes and color to be applied in various glazes and textures. This also allows for lettering on and between layers.  For more detail click on the thumbnail.

This is a 16×16 canvas collaged with unpainted double shuen.  It was then covered with a layer of white wash so that when it was dry I could use water media to write and also to allow me to impress letters into the surface.  If you look closely at the detail below you’ll see small block letters rising like bubbles from the sea.

There are more collaged papers giving the illusion of fish. The raised “seaweed” was created with gesso thinned with matte medium applied with a squeeze bottle. The illusion of sand was created with mica gels. The various layers of color are acrylic glazes.  I’ve posted the work here before any lettering is applied so that you can see the underlying structure more easily.