Show Your Work: Calligraphy Beginnings Part 3

Thanks to everyone who responded with likes and comments on the photos I posted on Instagram and Flickr for my first set of exercises as a calligraphy beginner.

The support, excitement and encouragement that felt really great.

Below is the third set of my practice run. I decided I’ll post in sets. It’s more manageable for me and I’m sure you would rather not be inundated with post after post of my calligraphy practice runs!

Capital A’s.

Capital H’s.

Rinse and repeat.

I’ve mentioned below how odd it is to see a letter over and over again. My eyes do get cross-eyed when I’m say, staring at a sea of captial H’s.

And as tedious and boring as it may seem, repeating a sea of A’s, H’s, M’s … I’ve discovered what aspects of each letter require special attention or more accurately, which parts of the letter I had trouble with the last time.

What I also found interesting is that I could almost tell that the letter wasn’t going to turn out so great simply by where I started my stroke. I had many silent cringe moments when I would realize this in the middle of a letter. Rats!

Capital M practice

Slowing down definitely helps.

It really makes you think about every placement of ink and the pressure with which you use to create thin and thick strokes. Slowing down makes you think about spacing and where to begin and end.

The creation of each letter feels very Zen. Even the sounds of the pen moving across the paper makes the process feel so real. Yeah, that’s about as best as I can explain it now.

My turtle helps me remember to slow down.

Calligraphy for me at this phase of my life is a way for me to recharge; to decompress; to be quiet.

The results so far may not be as beautiful as say calligraphy studio Brown Linen or calligrapher Molly Suber Thorpe, but for me, I’m happy to just start, do and make.

It’s a wonderful feeling.

Show Your Work: Calligraphy Beginnings Part 2

A few days ago I wrote about being a beginner again.

In the spirit of “learning it out in the open” and “Document[ing] your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you” from the book, Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, this is exactly what I plan to do. So, I hope you are interested and want to follow me on my journey as I learn calligraphy.

Note: I’m also sharing a few photos of my progress on Instagram and Flickr, too but here is where I’ll be sharing more photos and more thoughts about lessons learned.

Yesterday I started to practice my capital B’s, O’s and R’s.

If you are wondering why I’ve started with these letters, I’m focusing on the letters of my name first. It seemed to be the most logical!

Repetition

It’s the weirdest thing to look at duplicates of letters. After awhile they start to look funky and I feel cross-eyed. But I think that my execution improves due to a better understanding of what is working and not working.

(You’ll see some notes on my sheets as I got a bit frustrated or found some humor in my goofs.)

The results of about 30-45 minutes — capital B’s O’s and R’s.

I felt like the hardest parts of capital B’s and R’s were the following:

• Consistency with the bowls in terms of angle or is it axis? (Forgive me if my type terminology isn’t quite right. I’m rusty and correct me if I’m totally off!)
• Consistency in where the thick and thin strokes would appear.
• When to move into the tail for the R’s so they don’t look too wide and funky.

Getting the top of the B and the bottom bowl to be consistent in angle/axis was the big challenge.

Ink issues.

The O’s … oy.

I have to confess that I thought capital O’s were going to be super easy — hah!

If I was just creating a beautiful counter, it would have been easier but the little swash made getting the proportion of the counter that much harder.

I think it worked out better as I went a long but those first few were super butt-ugly. I had to laugh out loud because they looked utterly ridiculous!

See the second O? Hilarious.

Make like a turtle

I have a turtle figure around here somewhere and I’m going to put it near my — borrowing a cooking term here — mise en place for calligraphy to remind me to slow down.

“Slow down” is the constant reminder in my head as I see the details of my mistakes or what I perceive to be mistakes. Once I listen, the slower movements seem to yield better results.

We’ll see. I mean, I had this thought: How will I know if my execution is good without an expert? You know that 10,000 hours concept? 10,000 hours isn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

Next letters are capitals A’s, H’s and M’s. Yeah, I think 3 letters each time is good. I like three’s.

I’m a Beginner Again

This past May I finally took a calligraphy class.

Joanna (thank you — kisses) alerted me to a small workshop by calligrapher Christie Jones of Bedsidesign and I immediately signed up.

You see, I’ve been wanting to learn for years but everything else was a priority. I’m proud of myself for making that first step but I must admit, it feels a bit odd being a beginner at 42.

I don’t really know why I feel that way.

I was an beginner at web design in 2008 and somehow that seemed much more natural. It was an evolution along a similar, familiar work/career path.

Practicing my magiscules.

Magiscules detail.

Maybe it has to do with the tools?

As silly as this may sound, using a nib and ink feels more scary than using a computer to design. Calligraphy has permanence. Once the ink hits the paper, it’s there. There’s no command-z!

But the process, the creation of each part of a letter and watching the ink bind with paper is magical. It feels more tangible.

Still, I have so many moments when It feels awkward starting from scratch. I get frustrated and impatient.

• When am I ever going to get to a place when I can write words?
• When will I ever get the pressure of the ink to be consistent?
• When, when, when?

15 minutes

Christie reminded me that practice doesn’t have to be for hours; that just 15 minutes a day is a good place to start.

• Set a timer for 15 minutes and JUST practice. Write a’s over and over, b’s over and over etc. Practice one word, one sentence, all lowercase, all uppercase, mix it up. This helps steady your hand, figure out ink issues and get into a groove.
• IF you get into a groove, continue. If you are getting frustrated, or distracted, stop. It’s better to have 15 minutes of FOCUSED practice time VS. an hour of frustrated haphazard practice.

Practice and share. Practice and share.

Capital Ds. Hard!

Capital Es. They started to look funny.

I recently finished reading Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work and this truly resonated with me: “Look for something new to learn, and when you find it, dedicate yourself to learning it out in the open. Document your progress and share as you go so that others can learn along with you. Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they’ll have a lot to show you.”

So, here I am showing my work, my progress even though I believe it to be oh-so-dreadful. It isn’t good enough.

What was it that Ira Glass said?

I’m going to take his advice to ‘[not] quit’ and apply his encouragement to ‘do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work.’

Going through the alphabet.

So, here are my beginnings.

What about you? Have started something new recently? I’d love to know. Please share in the comments!