206 Short & Stripey two-toned

Late 19th-century calligraphers liked to write their Gothic letters with a scroll pen (double nib) and then fill the space inside the stroke with two colors.  Short & Stripey Two-Toned combines blue and yellow fill.  

Gradual vs abrupt color change.  

There are two approaches to try: 

1. Fill the lower half of the letter with blue first and then overlap the yellow to create green that gradually shades from blue to yellow.  
2. Or fill the top half of the letter with yellow first.  Let it dry completely.  Then fill the bottom half with blue, without overlapping and gradual shading.  

A third technique accents the contrast with gold. We'll try that next week.  

205 Short & Stripey color

You can dress up yesterday's Short & Stripey letters with color, which will make them more readable, too.  Choose a bright color.  Test it first, since a water-based color may make water-based stripes blur at the edges.  Better to letter the basic letters with water-proof black ink.   

204 Short & Stripey

This alphabet I call Short & Stripey.  It's a little easier to read than its cousin, Stripey, from July 17, #194.  A little.  

It's also really eye-catching if you add color inside the strokes.  Maybe we'll try that tomorrow.  

  

203 Simplicity cubed

12 pen widths tall, leaning at 20° away from vertical.   Most letter proportions about 2 x 3.  

☞  Left-hander friendly
This alphabet, Simplicity Cubed, is much harder than it looks.  Like cooking a gourmet meal with only what you can buy at a convenience store in a gas station, you have to make something exquisite from ordinary ingredients: block letters, Speedball monoline pen, and black ink on flat paper. 

It's a demanding alphabet: anything beautiful that is going to happen, you have to make happen.  

201 Zaftig

☞

The horizontals of [B] D E F P extend beyond the horizontals by one half pen width.  I seem to have omitted this feature on the top and bottom of B, which should look like the left edge of E, and R should look like P.  Try it that way.  Same with the inside of Q; the round end of the diagonal should be clearly visible.  

This style is not fat but Zaftig--pleasingly plump.  At four pen widths tall, it ought to look heavy and ponderous, but instead it makes me want to hug it.  Like a plush toy, not a stuffed sausage.  

I haven't touched it up much.  

202 Old caps

Write with a marker filled with water-soluble ink, moving the pen lightly and quickly so as not to saturate the watercolor paper -- don't lose the ragged edge that gives this style its name Old.  
See also Old small letters (August 19, #195)

Project: Decorating three kinds of Gothic space

We've done a lot of Gothic text letters this month.  You'll be wanting to "capitalize" on them.  Here's how, based on the simplified Gothic letter forms of Versals, below from May 6, #105.   

Gothic manuscript capitals are decorated in some combination of these three kinds of space: surrounding the letter, inside the letter, and within the letter stroke itself. The letters above show each one; the letter below shows all three together.  

Three kinds of ornament.  

1. Since many letters are circular shapes inside a square frame, you can decorate the corners. 

2. The interior space of most letters opens a window into foliage, pattern, or a scene.  

3. The space inside the stroke may be filled with ornament in color, or solid gold leaf (right).   

Medieval ornament wasn't always very elaborate.  This O is partly filled with parallel lines and loops.  This tiny R is painted blue and quickly filled and surrounded with simple red hash marks.  (Original size, about 1/4 " square. ) 

You can see some more examples of decorated capitals on my Pinterest board: http://pinterest.com/shepherdscribe/beautiful-letters-from-the-past/

The Y and O above are from the book 50 Medieval Manuscript Leaves, and are used here courtesy of David Bindle.  http://www.blurb.com/books/2272528-50-medieval-manuscript-leaves

Next Sunday's projects will explain how to place your capital letter in the text.  

200 Bands

The alternate letters at upper right are easier to dovetail than the more angular forms.  

Don't let the split nature of this script, Bands, fool you into thinking it is done with the same pen as yesterday's Split Ronde.  The white area between the black outlines is much narrower.

We summarized this week's various split letters last Sunday.  

199 Split Ronde small letters

Ascenders and descenders are at least twice the height of the letter body.  

These Split Ronde small letters accompany yesterday's caps.  The solid letters appeared on April 2, alphabet #76.  

198 Split Ronde caps

Split Ronde is based on a lovely, ornate, and space-consuming script from 18th-century France.  You can see it in a solid black version on March 26, #74.  

Don't try to rush it, and do finish up the stroke ends, swashes, and ball serifs.  I still struggle with this nib to keep the ink flowing evenly.  And, trust me, you should never try to push the stroke.

Preview of tomorrow's alphabet. 

197 Etchy

Simply copying a type design is like shooting fish in a barrel; extrapolating a whole alphabet from a few letters is much more of a challenge.  I saw this sign in a window on Boston's fashionable Newbury Street and just couldn't resist imagining how the other letters might look.  I'm sure someone out there knows the name of this typeface, but I had fun deriving it. I've named it Etchy.  


I noticed that a quirk of this style [left] is the enlargement of the first and last letters of a word or line.

196 Shimmy

This alphabet, Shimmy, turns the Gothic letter stroke into an undulating wave.  The outline is made by a double-pointed Staff pen [see yesterday's analysis of outline width].

In this design, the colors reinforce the shimmer.  If you want easier readability, use a third color for the interior of the stroke.  

195 Old

Don't letter too slowly or press down too hard, to keep your letter texture ragged along the edges.  

There are many ways to suggest that calligraphy letters are Old.  In this alphabet, I used a simple calligraphy marker, Sanford 2.5 mm, to write on 300 pound watercolor paper.  "Cold-press" paper has a very rough surface, which evokes the early technology of type, presses, and paper in colonial America.

I like the way sepia ink looks in the title.  Look for Old caps a week from now.  

Project: Experiment with thinner or heavier outlines

Very narrow, with staff pen.   Medium, with Scroll pen.    Stripey, with Bouwsma pen.    Stripling with Coit pen.  

Letter strokes don't have to be solid ink; some of the most interesting calligraphy styles are outlined.  Nibs with two points automatically "draw" these geometrically accurate, visually fascinating, and intellectually satisfying letters whenever you write. [figure of striped letters in a design]

But you still have to make some decisions; the width of the outline relative to the space it encloses will depend on your choice of letter size and pen nib.  Each pen delivers the ink with a little different technology, and will limit your choice.    

Coit pen

Three of the four split pens:

Staff pen. 

Bouwsma pen

Strokes and pens and sizes: 
Very narrow outlines are at most 1/10 as wide as the white space.  (Friendly Split August 16)
Outlines of medium weight (White Jacket August 8) are still narrower than the white space inside.   
The outlines in yesterday's alphabet Stripey Gothic are wide, as wide as the white space between them.  
Extremely wide outlines reduce the white space to a white thread, the inverse of the thin outline.  

194 Stripey

Stripey Gothic is written with outlined strokes, where the white interior is the same width as the black edges.  

193 Friendly Split

You'll need to pay extra attention to the ends of the 
strokes.  And notice that the joins at upper 
left of B, D, E, F, P, and R are different from 
classical Roman.  

This lovely letter style lets you transform Friendly Roman (April 24) into an outlined alphabet I've named Friendly Split. Like the other outlined alphabets this week, you do not draw it freehand, which NEVER convinces the viewer's eye, but write it with a two-pronged pen.

To make a light, accurate, and reliable outlined stroke, you need the right pen.  This one is adapted from the five-pointed music staff pen that used to be the easiest way to rule off parallel lines for writing musical notes. I used wire cutters to remove points 1, 2, and 4.  You could experiment with other configurations, including all five points, as seen in Staves (March 25).  It makes a big letter but the lines are clear.  

In lieu of adapting a music pen, you could try a scroll pen, a notched marker, or two sharpies rubber-banded together.  But keep the points narrow in relation to the width of the stroke, or you'll be into a group of Stripey alphabets (see July 17).    

192 Hatching

The dot that substitutes for the crossbar of E, F, and H solves the problem of rounding off awkward corners.  

Hatching is another in the series of letters based on Bright Idea.  It uses a scroll nib, notched marker, or other two-pronged pen to follow the edge of an invisible letter.  As with the other alphabets, this is easier if you can see through the page you're writing on to trace a faint image of those basic letters on the page below. 

After you've written the double-pointed line, you can add the short parallel hatching lines with a single-pointed pen.   

191 Semaphores

I like the little guy down in the corner, undoing the previous letter.  I wish I had that option as a life hack.  

It's late summer, and time to go sailing.  How do you "write" a message from ship to ship or ship to shore?  For centuries, people have used gestures and flags.  

These are Semaphores, made by a person holding two flags in a variety of positions.  Stringing signal flags on a rope is a different system altogether.  

190 Flopped Roman

Flopped* Roman goes out to classically-minded non-conformists, on International Left-handers' Day.  You know who you are....

You can write perfect Romans from the best models some 2000 years ago, without turning your arm or the page.  Yes, they're simply a mirror image of right-reading Roman.  Write them on the back of glass for signs; design wood blocks for printing; or just create beautiful calligraphy, scan it, and flop it.

*Flopped is a bona fide graphic design term, now described as "flip horizontal." The first specification I ever attached to a photo was "flop, crop, and bleed to the gutter."   

Even if you write from the right, try today's flopped version just to give yourself a taste of what the other 15% has been coping with in a right-handed calligraphy world.

189 Bold Italic

The tight curves of S look better in some designs if you let them expand beyond the guidelines.  The proportions of the letter bodies are about 5 x 6.  

Enough Gothic for a while.  Here is a tough, indestructible, all-purpose alphabet of Bold Italic letters.  They're about 4 pen widths tall and will pull any load you attach them to.  

Penguin spacing lessons

The baffled little guy all by himself at the far right reminds us that Gothic text letters, unlike Gothic capitals, seldom stand on their own.

After a week of learning from penguins, we can see that they have a lot more to teach us about letters, which are easy to imagine as living, breathing, behaving creatures. Always standing around in a crowd, penguins generally bunch up in cold weather and then spread out in warm weather.  Your letter spacing can do the same.    

You may also want to let the letters themselves--as well as the spaces between them--get wider.  

But do keep them a little more uniformly arranged than the ones here.

187 Inclined Gothic

These penguins guide the beginner through Gothic in my basic book Learn Calligraphy.  Long ago I began to see the resemblance between Gothic letters and groups of stiff, black-coated penguins.   Now I can't un-see it.  

While Gothic calligraphy is usually upright, some of it does lean forward.  I've named this alphabet Inclined Gothic, giving your ears the opportunity to hear it also as "inklined".  Or not, if you don't like puns.  

186 Lab Coat Gothic

Lab Coat Gothic lets penguins take off their formal dinner jackets and put on practical white coats. 

185 Fancy Hat Gothic

These penguins guide the beginner through Gothic in my basic book Learn Calligraphy.  Long ago I began to see the resemblance between Gothic letters and groups of stiff, black-coated penguins.  Now I can't un-see it.  

To make Fancy Hat Gothic, all you have to do is elaborate the endings of the ascenders.  Add similar swashes to the descenders to give the letters lace petticoats.  

184 Top Hat Gothic

These penguins guide the beginner through Gothic in my basic book Learn Calligraphy.  Long ago I began to see the resemblance between Gothic letters and groups of stiff, black-coated penguins.   Now I can't un-see it.  

Very similar to Half Gothic (June 19), Top Hat Gothic flattens the pointed tops of the letters.  Frankly, this works better for some letters than others, making it paarticularly useful for logos and a few selected words.  

183 Gothic Kewpies

Just for the fun of it, and to help everyone keep cool, this week's blog will feature penguins.  The creature teachers were drawn by my daughter Zoe Friend, an art student then and now a working sculptor.  

These penguins help the beginner understand Gothic in my basic book Learn Calligraphy.  Long ago I began to see the resemblance between Gothic letters and groups of stiff, black-coated penguins.  Now I can't un-see it.  

You can turn your letters into Gothic Kewpiesa by adding little curlicues to their hairdos.  Use a small pen after you have finished lettering with a wide pen.   

Syncopation

Several of the styles you learned this week (Swing, Arched Italic) can lead you into wonderfully syncopated designs: let the letters lean at various angles; lengthen some of the vertical strokes up or down; and let them stand above or below the base line. Letters are people too, and they don't have to behave themselves every minute.  Blend a little anarchy into the regimentation.     

I used the style at left for the title of my book Calligraphy Alphabets Made Easy to give the sense of energy, creativity, and individuality. The letters have an almost random relation to the base line.    


At right, the Italic chapter in Learn Calligraphy ends with letters that come alive and start to dance. They follow a curved baseline but lean at different angles.   

182 Arched Italic

The outlined strokes are optional.  

Arched Italic lets this well-behaved calligraphy style escape from toeing the line and conforming to uniform standards. The letters themselves are slightly arched.  

But it's what you do when you arrange them into a design that lets them really express themselves.  Tomorrow's project will give you three techniques for encouraging them to bust loose.     

181 Swing caps

You can play fast and loose with the overall structure, but watch the serifs and joins; they give this alphabet its distinctive look.   

Swing Caps can stand on their own, or accompany small letters ftom Swing lower case (July 29, #177). They extend just outside the guidelines here and there.   

Preview of tomorrow's alphabet.  

180 Light-ish Roman

The O and Q could be a little wider.  The stem of Y could be shorter in relation to the top.   

Light-ish Roman, at 12 pen widths tall, lies somewhere between heavy Roman that is 5 pen widths tall (July 10) and very light Roman that is 16 pen widths tall (March 28).  It's light but not gravity-defying.  

Like other light versions of familiar scripts, there's nowhere to hide. You have to get the lines straight, make the corners square, and keep your hand steady.