Our next meeting will take place on Monday, February 13, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM in the meeting room at the Cold Smoke Coffeehouse just off 19th and Oak.
At our January meeting, after an interesting show and tell, we began looking at Peter Thornton’s letters that make a square or rectangle or trapezoid part of a stroke in each character. We also talked a little bit about painting them as illuminated initials.
The handout I made was a good starting point, but only a starting point.
Here are some links that will help you see where this is going, in descending order of relevance:
- A gallery of work from a May 2020 workshop Peter taught in Ottaway. That first slide is one of the pieces I showed you in the Adolf Bernd book. The rest are Peter’s work. You’ll find the color study that looks for small gradations of mixtures, the letter shapes broken into pieces to add white, the flying corners that delineate the space, some ornamentation adapted from medieval illumination, and so much more. (I find the navigation finicky; just click to the right or left of a large image to go forward or backward.)
- This blog post details a 4-day workshop with Peter that includes some of the decorative elements we looked at. Great images, and the description is well worth reading, too. (Chrome automatically translates from German to English for me.)
- If you want to concentrate on the Adolf Bernd style of painting of these letters, Catherine Langsdorf has an incredible Pinterest board that consists mostly of student work in Adolf Bernd workshops that Peter has taught.
- The letters we are studying go beyond his “button alphabet”, but see this blog post about a workshop that Louis Lemoine taught to see how the letters we are studying had their genesis here. Louis’s exemplar is stellar. (Click on the images for a larger image.)
On February 13, I will provide an exemplar using the more useful rounded trapezoid — as opposed to the square in the exemplar we used this week. We’ll experiment with that, and we’ll also do some watercolor studies. For this you’ll need:
- pencil and eraser
- a couple of sheets of practice paper
- a couple of sheets of watercolor, just 6″ square or so
- watercolors – a travel set or a couple of tubes and a palette
- mixing brushes
- a rag for blotting your brush
- a good round watercolor brush, size 1-2
- water container
As always, please bring anything you’re working on or finished recently, including (but not limited to) scribbles, samplers, work you’ve done on the Peter Thornton alphabet this month, etc.
