Mark your calendars! Our next meeting will take place on Monday, April 11, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM in the meeting room at the Cold Smoke Coffehouse just off 19th and Oak.
In March, we met in-person for the first time in a long time, and, although the number of participants was small, it was so nice to be meeting face-to-face again! We shared what we have been working on — lettering practice, calligraphy for wood-burned garden markers, small work on wood panels with acrylics, an accordion book in a box, and more.
We looked at a simple monoline italic exemplar, going through each letter in pencil and talking about the modularity of the strokes, the modifications we make for aesthetic reasons (flattened bowl endings, the almond shape), and spacing. We explored variations that could be made, even within monoline italic letters: width, slant, branching position, ascender/descender length, bowl shape, pressure and release, and more. During the coming month, our homework is to explore those variation possibilities.
On April 11, we will add the broad-edge pen and explore an upright italic that is 5 pen-widths high (downloadable PDF to be printed on letter size paper).
What to bring on Monday:
- 2mm pen (Tape or Brause, or Mitchell #2)
- ink or paint
- water, loading brush, some paper towels, as needed
- paper — practice drawing paper or watercolor paper or other good paper
- anything you’ve been working on for show-and-tell
If the paper you are going to be using is thin enough to this guideline sheet (downloadable PDF to be printed on letter size paper) beneath it, use the guideline sheet to draw pencil guidelines on the paper you’ll bring on Monday.
See the chart below to choose your pen nib size. If you missed the April 11 meeting, no worries. Feel free to jump in this month.
