Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Arabian Nights Title Pg low res

About a year ago, I did the title and author names for Open Design's Six Arabian Nights project.

This is a stretched out hand called, "Legend", which has the sense of drawn-out swoopiness you find in Arabic writing.

Compare this to the Carolingian from the last two posts, and you'll note both have squat, drawn out shapes to their letters. So you can see how this hand was developed from the older form.

Copyright Open Design 2008.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Carolingian Practice 2 low res

After a week of practicing, you can seem my ability to write in Carolingian has improved quite a bit. Some good things here, like "wonderment" at the bottom right.

There's still some experimentation, but that's true even when I know a hand well

I like trying out different ways to write letters to see what works best for a particular project. But I always try to maintain good lettering practices like consistency, etc, or at least knowing why I am breaking the "rule" for a particular point.

General Points
** Dating your work like I have allows you to see how much you've progressed. However, I don't keep many of these pieces due to sheer volume. If you did keep them, you could cut them up and use them for collage elements or bookbinding.

** If you're just learning a hand and are writing with letter families (see post from 1/26/09), then exercise your brain trying to come up with words with just those letters.

Other brain expanding options: words that begin with particular letters, words with many different letters. Or just use pangrams like, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

Copyright 2009 Shelly Baur.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Carolingian Practice 1 low res

I'm learning a new hand, Carolingian, that was developed and popularized under Charlemagne the Great.

Here's my very first page of practicing.

Not that I can imagine people swiping this particular "piece", but copyright Shelly Baur 2009.

Tips for learning a new hand
Since many of you have fountain pens, you can learn to write with this font. Of course, any chisel-edge will do including markers.

1. Start off just trying to do basic marks with the correct pen angle. Note the squares in the upper left corner. Then the swooshes then the circles.

Carolingian mostly adheres to a 20 degree angle. So these practices help you get used to writing at 20 degrees, plus learn to make some of the basic lines/curves of the hand.

2. After you have the basic pen angle down, try to draw your lines at the writing angle. Carolingian tilts at a 5 degree angle from a straight line. You can see me start working on this with the line of l's I did.

3. Add in letters. My instructor believes starting with lettering "families" makes things easier in the beginning. So all the letters that are based on "o" like c and e are practiced, and so on.

4. Then add in words to get good spacing both between letters and between words.

5. I find that tracing a practice sheet using the same sized pen gives me the muscular coordination to do lettering much, much faster than if I try to duplicate a sheet from just looking at an exemplar. So, this example is done on good tracing paper.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Dayglow Supernova L

Copyright Shelly Baur 2009

Taking my husband Wolf's suggestion to push the color scheme all the way to day glo. (At least, as far as I could easily do with my current color palette.)

decorated k's

Copyright Shelly Baur 2009

Results of the the gouache color test I posted about in the last entry.

* Upper left: Color scheme that's more in line with William Morris and the Arts and Craft movement. Cadmium yellow shade, pearl gold, with the green and purple both custom mixes. Violet shades weren't developed until the Victorian era when a chemist processed them from coal tar.

* Upper right: Traditional colors including cobalt blue, cadmium red/alizarin crimson mix, brilliant gold, and a shade of cadmium yellow.

* Lower right: Traditionally, the royal colors of purple and gold were used for premier book projects. I tried the gold both on the white background and on top of a red base to see the comparisons. Other than the pearl gold, everything else is a mixed color

* Lower left: Cerulean blue, sap green, cadmium red, and a shade of cadmium yellow. Came out looking like acid house colors almost. Wolf thinks I should just push things all the way with the day-glo colors and see what I come up with.

Gouaches used were artist's quality Windsor & Newton's. Except for the golds, which were Schmincke.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

gouache color test

Copyright Shelly Baur 2009

Inspired by a new color book I received recently, I tried out a number of gouache colors trying to be a bit bolder in color schemes.

I tend to use my favorite colors like cobalt blue and wanted to force myself to play a bit more with ones like cerulean blue and some colors I mixed from primaries.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Art Show

My Piece, Light, is currently hanging in the ER Gallery. More info here: http://redeemer-kenmore.org/artsblog/2008/12/05/out-of-darkness-artist-shelly-baur/

It was part of the promotional postcard calligraphy used for the show, Out of Darkness (Into Light), curated by artist Angela Rockett.