Mick Paine Workshop

I was lucky to only be teaching for the first half of the Festival at Malvern, so I was free to attend Mick Paine's workshop in the second half. I have admired Mick's work since sitting behind him at the Sunderland Symposium - can it really be as long ago as 2003! It was the year the classes stayed put and the tutors moved round and Brody Neuenschwander was one of the tutors who demonstrated his collage method one day which he has used in this piece from the period that I like best of his work. See more here - www.brodyneuenschwander.com/gallery.php

Mick picked this up and ran with it. He gave a wonderful talk on his work last year at Letter Exchange too, so I was really looking forward to his workshop at last and really seeing how he worked. Mick used to have a very informative website but it doesn't seem to be up at the moment so here is just one example of his work.

 Mick's workshop was entitled 'Rules and Randomness' and started us off on a different way of approaching a new piece of work. It worked for me this time and got me off to a quick start. We began by writing down things that were important to us as individuals. Mine were - family; landscape; holidays we've had and two special books that I use frequently.

Procrastination averted, I started a mindmap with a family name of Field linking to the landscape idea and plans for a family tree which had been on hold for some time.

then using a dice and random number generator on my phone I selected from various lists and pages from the two books ...

p78 from Calligraphy A Book of Contemporary Inspiration by Denise Lach - the most inspiring book I have bought in recent years...

and page 186 from Alphabets Old and New (see previous post) - perhaps one of the least interesting pages in this book - but titled 'Cursive writing'

The country I had visited came out as Spain and as I was planning a visit to Barcelona at the time I took Antoni Gaudi as inspiration and used this photo of the walls at Parc Guell (I now know must have been taken when no-one was there) found online

I spent a lot of time colouring the middle section with pencil around the word family - I got pretty attached to it trying to link it to the crazy paving of the Gaudi wall - but it was not working and had to go! 

Things started to come together once that had been covered up with some paper I had coloured for my Salisbury Hospital commission last year (see piece below) when I first started to experiment with collage. 

I hope you can see the Denise Lach influence with the linked squares now covered with tissue with square holes cut in it and the reddish brown squares cut from one of my trials for my Kings and Queens piece (shown in the All That Glisters Exhibition and in an earlier post). 

Names from different generations filled the levels of the wall with grandparents at the top and children at the bottom.

Now some copper leaf added - but not happy with the word Genealogy...

so that got covered up with gesso and stencilled squares and lastly more significant names running vertically. 

I really enjoyed working on this piece and finished it back home over several days to allow for drying between stages. I like being able to cover mistakes and change the design as I go but I ditched the randomness once I got started because personally I think there comes a time when real decisions have to be made on aesthetic qualities and not just chance.

Here is my earlier collage of hand coloured papers with pointed brush lettering, gold leaf and coloured pencil, on one of three pieces completed for Salisbury Hospital. The words used were written by poet in residence Rose Flint.

CLAS Festival at Malvern

Life has been a bit busy since I returned from the CLAS Festival - now at last a chance to catch up and share some of the work done in my workshop. It was a daunting prospect my first experience of teaching at the Festival - though I have attended many myself. I was very pleased with how it all went - first of all the setting was amazing and the chance for a swim or a walk up the hill after class was a real bonus.

Day One
Drawn to Lettering - Line

We spent most of day one looking at pressure and release. We started with exercises inspired in this design book from the 1970's which describes a course for design students in Switzerland. It was on the shelf in the first school I taught Art in and I used it a lot in my teaching before I got interested in calligraphy.

We started just working with making lines on a sheet of A3 paper, using a sharp pencil, B or 2B increasing the pressure at the start and end of each stroke, leaving a space between strokes and working on creating a page of even texture.

This is the first example from the book

We gradually built up the exercises until we were nearly making letters, adding first diagonal strokes, then half horizontal and vertical strokes and then curves and small curves and joining two strokes together. The exercise is really good at making students look at the space around marks and the overall texture of a page of lettering. 

The art students would have spent several days on this process - I didn't feel I could make my workshop participants spend more than the first half of the morning on it before we moved on to looking at this cursive majuscule script from the 1st Century.

We made some backgrounds for a potential concertina book using sumi ink on BFK Rives printmaking paper and these were some of the results at the end of one day using charcoal pencil and/or coloured pencil and some watercolour pencil.

  

  

  

Day Two Drawn to Lettering - Shape

We started day two with some warm up exercises practising and refining shading techniques. Then looking at shape and to try to get ourselves away from line we used paper and knives. There are 26 letters in the alphabet but only ten numbers so we used numbers and developed designs overlapping and repeating shapes using tracing paper.

I was thrilled with the resulting designs:

Moving on and using a favourite old book of mine that my father bought second hand for 7/6d (that's old money for 37p) called Alphabets Old and New edited by Lewis F Day with a preface to the third edition in my copy, written in 1910. This is the book that started my interest in lettering - it has drawings of letters from inscriptions and manuscripts that are put into alphabetical order - the pages we used for inspiration were from the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels.

These were the results - all very individual.

Giclee prints

I am quite excited about the giclee prints I have had done of two of my pieces. The quality is fantastic, they are the same size as the original and I am hand finishing the Sator prints with copper leaf. Though I say it myself it is hard to see the difference close up. I am limiting the editions to 50 - if you are interested in buying one email me via the website www.penandinkcalligraphy.co.uk

Oxford City Arms

I've been working hard on my Oxford City Arms - I've done the writing on the vellum now and have spent many hours doing vellum trials of the border design.

raised and burnished gold on gesso and shell gold for the chain, fritillaries painted in watercolour, shields in gouache

had to use a magnifying glass to see what I was doing - I never thought I would be able to do the shields that small - still not perfect but better than I expected

this is the writing on the vellum  - I used gold gouache for the smaller writing and metal pens after many trials with quills, in the end it was just more reliable with the pen.

the chaos of my desk!

Oxford Scribes Summer Newsletter

I am so excited to be able to show you a little preview at last of the latest newsletter for Oxford Scribes, available exclusively to members, so please join - we have members far and wide and I think we are the biggest regional calligraphy group in the UK . 

http://www.oxfordscribes.co.uk/

This article was written by Tim Noad about his work on the Royal Charter awarded to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. I am so grateful to Tim, who is one of our most prestigious members, for his generous contribution to this edition of the Newsletter.