All that Glisters

This is my piece currently in the CLAS All that Glisters Exhibition. I had a great time at the private view in London meeting up with old friends at the Oxo Gallery and then a whole afternoon stewarding a week later. What a venue!  It was great to see the surprise of people who just walked in off the embankment who didn't know about contemporary calligraphy. There were also lots of visitors from calligraphy groups from around the country. 

There is still time to catch it at Bath and I will be stewarding again there - hope to see some more old friends and new ones too there.

I should add that this is done using a thin pointed brush with built up strokes using different gold gouache paints from Winsor & Newton and Schmincke on Ingres paper

Lay Members Day

Back to London again for the third time in as many weeks to Lay Members Day and the embarrassment of having my work in the exhibition criticised in public. I have to say I think the crit of the members exhibition is rather ponderous and of limited value - it forced Ewan Clayton to limit his erudite and fascinating talk, on the history of writing, into 35 minutes and then it was time to rush for the train home (only one an hour to the sticks!)

I did my bit for the organisation of the day by persuading three new members to join the SSI (Society of Scribes and Illuminators) and I bought myself some new watercolours. I don't know why I haven't done so ages ago. It was Lin Kerr's workshop on Adolf Bernd that inspired me to do so and I also took a leaf out of her book and made myself a concertina of all my watercolours in almost the same order as in the tin - old and new together. The new colours are so luscious and easy to build up that I think what I thought I had as artists colours may only have been student quality after all - well they are at least 30 years old!

Secret Belgian Bindings

Many thanks to Viva Lloyd for an excellent workshop yesterday on Secret Belgian Bindings. Viva's workshops are always well paced with plenty of emphasis on doing rather than watching - it is good to be regularly reminded of how it feels to be a participant rather than a teacher and I think the satisfaction of finishing something (even if it is when you get home) never leaves you and it is something I try to achieve in my own workshops.

I'm busily planning my session for the CLAS Festival this summer and I need to get a materials list off this week. I am going to use my workshop with Windrush Scribes this week to try out some new ideas - fingers crossed they will work out!

Oxford Scribes

I recently volunteered to edit the Oxford Scribes Newsletter. 

It has taken me a few weeks and not much calligraphy done in the meantime, to get to grips with InDesign and I still have a lot to learn but my first edition of the Oxford Scribes Newsletter Spring 2012 should be dropping through letterboxes any day now. I was pleased to get this first one finished and printed for a little bit less than was paid for the old style edition but with a much higher quality for the images in particular.

here is the centre page spread as a taster

end of term

Term has finished for both my calligraphy classes. We worked on foundational hand this term, making a simple concertina book to show off what had been learned. I think it is so important to use calligraphy and not to just sit and practise the same letters or words over and over again. All my students have different amounts of time to spend on their calligraphy outside of the classes and naturally this is reflected in their progress but I was really pleased with their finished books that celebrate the stage they as individuals have reached and gives them something to look back on.

Kingfishers

 

I haven't seen the kingfisher on the river for a couple of months now - in fact, since the cold weather,   hope they have survived the winter - but I did finish my piece of work. This is the finished piece (but not the one I submitted for lay members day)

It has been through a few changes! I think this is the second time I washed all the lettering off!

I made a grid for the lettering so I wouldn't have the problem of erasing guide lines without removing the pastel I had applied to soften the background and I had the original layout just above my lettering while I worked on it

this is where I put my work to stop the cats and dog from walking or sitting on it - I spend a lot of time looking and thinking - I probably should have stopped at this stage!

This is the stage where I was having trouble getting the blue writing to show up so I tried a darker background - that was soon covered up...and all the red lettering was washed off too

Back to Reigate

Well I've taken the plunge and enrolled for another term studying Heraldry, Illumination and Calligraphy at East Surrey College with Gerald Mynott. I'm hoping to finish my piece on Oxford City which hasn't had any work since I was last there a year ago. It is only one day a week and at least in the summer term I shall not be driving home for 2 hours in the dark after a day of close work. I shall post my progress here.

Work in Progress

I am working on piece for the SSI Lay Members' Day exhibition. 

The poem 'Kingfisher' appealed to me because I regard the occasional views of a kingfisher on our local stream as very special. You can never count on seeing one but if you always stop and just look for a while you may just catch sight of one. I took my camera with me and recorded some shots of the places I have seen the kingfisher in recent weeks

 

then I played with some of them on the computer and iPad with Photoshop using artistic filters

 this is the view I used for the background, simplified with the filters to softer areas of colour

 I tried looking at this view of a side stream too but the water was going away from me and I wanted the flash of the kingfishers flight to cross the screen

I tried this view too further upstream (a different kingfisher is seen on this part of the river)

and blocked in some text on Photoshop, just to try out some spacing

Then using a board that had a sheet of cream Canson paper already stretched on it I started to experiment with the background. I used a lot of FW ink and clingfilm effect and then added some sepia ink with bubble wrap on another layer - then decided it wasn't working and painted over it all with Plaka. The aim was (fortunately) to create a waterproof background that I could write on.

the background was still too dominant so I put a layer of pastel powder 

over it before I wrote the poem out and added a streak of turquoise gouache. 

I was quite happy with it and cut it off the board.

 then I tried it again on piece of black Ingres paper which worked a bit better ...so...

I decided to wash the writing off the background and start again!

quick pause to make a valentine card

then it will be back to drawing board!