And two more colors

Oh, yeah, I forgot; I use these two Prismacolor pencils a lot in making rough drafts.  So now I have mixed some ink to match them, too, and I am working them into current designs for Song of Songs.  

At right: Pale gray lavender-lilac and chartreuse/lime 

In fact, if you don't intend to get any new supplies, you still might want to have these convenient bottles for custom-mixing small amounts of ink. The droppers let you fill your pen neatly instead of dipping.   

 bottles: Vivaplex, 24, Clear, 15 ml (1/2 oz) Glass Bottles, with Glass Eye Droppers


Calligraphers welcome every chance to explore color; its hue, saturation, and brightness, and how it changes when another color is nearby.  It's one more way to let the reader hear the tone of voice that words on paper suggest.  

Colors that I like to come back to

Shortly after I started copying the Song of Songs, Which is Solomon's, I designed a title page that used seven strong, basic colors, which I have gone on to use over and over in the 50-some designs for the group.  I was especially partial to orange, indigo blue, and gray. 

But along the way I have found some new favorite colors that surprised me.  (If you've just sworn off browsing in art supply stores or sites because you already have too many pencils or inks, you might want to skip this post. I have too many pencils and pens and inks but I still just can't resist one more.)  
By exploring the Prismacolor display, I've found four colors new to me and learned to mix them with ink. 

• First is the palest "Grey Green Light" color that I've already worked into the background of three pieces to add soft, subtle texture.   
• The second is "Black Grape" that gives purple truly serious weight.  It was the perfect foil for the cream and sepia band of color in "Majestic as the..." Now I use it often.  
• The third is "Metallic Green," a verdigris that seems to solve every color problem I encounter.  It's almost worn down, to a 3" stub.  Too bad for me, it seems to have been discontinued.  I'd give a big reward for anyone who finds one more.  
• Orange comes in a lot of variations, such as the "Vermilion" here.  I like it because it punches through soft gray colors.  

Here are three of the designs 
I've used these colors in.  Let me know your own favorite colors.    

Kinds of light from the sky

SONG of SONGS: Timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 

Letters, letter strokes, and lines of letters can portray many natural forms.  Here, suggested by the central metaphor, they portray what we see in the sky.  

(Scanned at home, not corrected yet for tone)

•    A round area of aqua letters makes the disc of the moon.
•     A descending column of gray letters falls right through the blue letters, suggesting a broad beam of light.
•    A diagonal sliver of gold falls at a different angle within that beam.
•    Simple lines of lettering with the verse's citation make thin rays of light.  
•     The words spoken by the other young women form two other rays of light, set off to the left like a chorus or echo just outside the central spotlight.
•    Traditional repeating pen strokes radiate out from the glowing moon, and evoke its pale greenish-bue light.  

We are so grateful to live in an era when astronomers' photos fill our eyes with gorgeous images of the heavens nearby and of deep space.     

  

Galaxy arms Part two

SONG of SONGS: Timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 
Galaxy arms Part two: 
After comparing total randomness with strictly repeating pattern, I combined the two ideas.  The four different swaths I ended up making were based on spiraling galaxies, the DNA double helix, two twined colors, and an irregular sine wave that faded in and then faded out. In each case, the pattern formed against a background of random dots.  

I wanted the galaxy arms to have a similar texture to the lines of lettering--not too dense or too light--and to in some way echo the words in both form and content. 

Galaxy arms Part One

Song of Songs: Timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 

The vortex design posed many challenges.  How DO you show the arms of a galaxy?  Stars without number, and clouds, gases, black holes, and things we don't even have names for?  It's a little off-topic for a calligraphy design, but I've learned from decades of calligraphic design that to harmonize with the letters on the page, most decorative elements should be done with the same pens and inks.  
The decorative trails between the lines of lettering were mainly made of dots, plus a few stars and new moons and planets.  I experimented with both a random sprinkling, and with some clearly repeating patterns before I found a blend of both that also hinted at the underlying structure of astro-physics. 
Here are the experiments that didn't make it: random swaths of dots, at right, and some repeating patterns below that were too obvious.  Mimicking the texture of text is not simple; it challenges you to find more than letters in your pen.  

(Please overlook my problems with the background tone.) 

 

Seriously!

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 



Sometimes calligraphers have to guard against making words too pretty, too quaint.  I like to use Versal letters, familiar capitals from medieval manuscripts, because they have more majesty, presence, and warmth than pure Roman or casual Italic.  But Versals can exude a little too much charm, reminding people of the middle ages or of Victorian Christmas cards, (above).  

The frank, fervent declaration of anguished love in this text called for letters that would make the words more stark and serious.  I took out or shortened some of the ball finials in my first draft.    
Compare the two sets of Versals at right to see where I simplified the capitals.
   

Lettering on the curve; belt or disc?

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 

Rough draft, undecided
between disc or belt,
with both curves shown.
The warm yellow tone in
the center will come later. 

About V: 2 - 6. Letters can suggest not just depth but also the angle you are seeing it from.  I had a lot of trouble deciding whether the curved arms that spiral outward from the galaxy's vortex should look like they are on a belt, like a ring from an astrolabe, or suggest a disc, like the rings of Saturn.  They looked confusing in my draft, shown at left.  
It was hard to describe the problem with words, even to myself, so finally I had to build little models out of stiff paper, letter on them, and stare at them.  




Right, note how the verticals lean in at the ends of the upper curve in this belt mockup...           
...or out at the ends of the lower curve.  

Left, in the disc mockup, the letters lean out at the ends of the upper curve... 

...or in at the ends of the lower curve.  

  



I just could not decide how to portray the universe using letters.  Finally, I went back and looked at the astronomy photos that first inspired me.  That's when I discovered I should use BOTH kinds of letters.  They needed to start out flat on a disc, and end upright on a belt, and then vice versa below the vortex. 


There are two useful design lessons to learn here: 
1. If you can describe the problem, you can start to solve it;  
2. Your original inspiration--thumbnail sketch, napkin scribble, or internet search result--is often the most useful corrective to confusion.  

From joy to despair

Song of Songs: Timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy.

I wanted my overall layout to suggest the intense pleasure and intense despair described in Chapter V: Verses 2 - 6.  I set myself the goal of using only the line spacing to evoke emotions.  

The text reads very simply, from top to bottom.  
   

The curves get closer and closer to each other as the young woman hears her lover approaching; the lines crowd together around  the glowing vortex (at present just a white space) where her "heart trembles;" then when he is unexpectedly gone the lines start to pull apart; finally when she says "he did not answer" her hope seems to drift into the cold and dark of the empty sky at night.  At that point, she feels as far from him as a distant star.  

Making the page glow

About 12" diameter.  

I have been trying out ways to support the visual image in the passage from Song of Songs VI: 8 - 10, which compares the beloved to the sun and moon.  To sum up various translations, she is said to be "luminous as the moon" and "brilliant as the sun."  Both of them glow; after I tried to get the glow of both moonlight and sunlight onto the same page, I began to see that they would cancel each other out.  So I settled on moonlight, with its spectrum of cool, greenish, bluish, lavender glow, to frame the main sentence.  I kept adding more  white to make the colors harmonize and not overwhelm the foreground.  

Detail

I used a 17th century calligraphic zigzag to give the colors subtle sparkle., and to maintain the language of the pen.  I'm not sure how far I'm going to let them radiate out from the center.  

There will be more lines of text to add once this layer dries.  

What does the universe look like? V: 2 - 6

Song of Songs: Timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy.

Every step of this design was really hard to get right.  The translation desperately needed modernizing; the intense emotions it described went from pleasure to despair; the fiery central glow had to be created from pen strokes; the lettering should follow curved guidelines.  
I'll describe how I made some of these decisions.  
   
1. Several words from the King James Version clearly needed re-translation.  When the woman hears her lover at the door, she says that "my bowels were moved for him." It's a real mood-killer.  Of course the modern reader, startled, can figure out the idea, but this phrase that was routine 500 years ago is unpleasant today. I substituted words from a later version, which also convey a visceral reaction but without any unwanted associations, "my heart trembled within me."*  


Translating the Bible for calligraphy is like rendering it for musical performance; you want the meaning and the art to reach the viewer or listener without any distraction.  


*The 50-some translations I consulted ranged widely to describe this gut feeling of anticipation: from "I was thrilled that he was near" to "my heart began to pound for him" to "I felt excited inside" to "my inmost being yearned for him."  

What does wind look like?

Song of Songs: Timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy.






















This tandem design was too tame to portray the force of wind.
  
Sometimes you need a few failures to find a design that works. Above is my first take on the text at the end of Chapter IV that starts "Awake thou, O north wind..."  

I tried to distinguish among the four distinctly different thoughts that fill this very short verse by making the two winds seem to blow into and out of the garden.*  But they didn't have any force, and the green letters didn't add up to a garden.  

*Note: Against all artistic advice, I rushed to complete these for an exhibition deadline.  A lesson to remember; you cannot rush the design process.  

On the next try, I took the time to ask myself: What does wind look like?  Once I began to develop a design that suggested the wind's motion, I also had to decide, how big is the wind? and what color? 

These were drafted at maquette size, about 4" x 5,"
letting me try a design quickly and then move on.  

Through a series of drafts, I focused on the garden wall to create a sense of privacy, and then let the wind swirl around it.  


I went down a few dead end streets before I found a path to my present design; whirls of wind around a garden seen from above.  Then there were details to tweak: the relative sizes of the wind and the hedge; how uneven the contour of the hedge should be; where to add the citation; even the shape of the finials on top of the gold fence rails.  A path of small, careful decisions leads to a design.   

This blue ink (above) is 
actually much closer 
to the original tone
than the aqua in the full 
picture (above right).

Parallel evolution

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 
The series of Song of Songs is on view at First Church, Boston, until November 19, 2017.

Some designs keep evolving till they reach where they want to go; others, however, want to have a second, distinct identity that develops in a different direction.  The design here is from the same “GARDEN ENCLOSED” scripture shown in a different design at left, but the layout is different.   
I used rose stems to form the garden enclosure; this gave me the chance to use the many ascenders and descenders* to suggest leaves.  I took a chance that making the flower stems slightly crooked would not create an uneven tone of voice in the reader’s ear.  I filled the O spaces with orange to look like little fruits in the shrubbery.  

*A feature of lower case letters, ascenders go up: b, d, f, h, k, l, and half-way t. Descenders go down: g, j, p, q, y, sometimes f.  Sometimes you need to rearrange your layout to give these long lines room to grow; then you will find out what they want to be.  

Fixing the "oops"

Yesterday's post about proofreading raised the topic of how to handle the mistakes you find.  
Let's define "mistake" as pigment that doesn't belong where it is on the page.  There are several ways to handle a calligraphy mistake. 
First do no harm.  I can't emphasize this enough; don't make the situation worse by over-reacting.  Spend 10 minutes to assess the error, relax, remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes. 
Assess the limits of your materials: What kind of ink: is it made of pigment or dye?  What kind of paper: soft and spongey or coated to keep the ink from soaking into the fiber?     
Level of scrutiny vs magnitude of error: is this a small glitch or something fundamental to the whole piece?  how close will the reader be to the page?  Is this original art or is it for a print?    

Hold the paper against a mailing tube or... 

... roll the paper around itself. 

In my recent mistake--the extra comma after the word "glance"--several factors were working for me: the paper had a hard surface already, called hot press, plate finish; it was made harder by a thin coat of sizing; the ink had dried to a thick layer on top, scarcely soaking into the paper fibers; the comma was sitting in white space, all by itself.  These allowed me to put a fresh blade* in the X-acto knife, curve the paper over a cylinder, and shave the ink off.  
*either curved #10 or pointed #11

With the blade parallel to the paper, peel up the smallest possible surface layer, then trim it off at a right angle to the first motion.  

    

Proofread it one more time!

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy.  

Corrected. How? see the next post.  

One comma too many

If you learn just one thing today, learn to take off your calligrapher's hat and put on your proofreader's hat.  I was ready to frame and show this finished design when a typo* jumped out at me.  Can you find it?


That prompted me to go back and re-proof my other two-dozen finished pages.  

This is the most frequent question that people ask calligraphers; what do you do if you make a mistake?  We will look at one solution this week.   

*Technically, a calligrapher's mistake should be a "write-o." 

G is for gem. But which g? Which gem?

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy.  


As soon as I saw the final lines, about being ravished with one glance, "with one gem from your necklace" I knew that the word "gem" was a gift. No calligrapher could resist enlarging that g and embedding a round gem in it.  Since the landscape was rendered in tints of gray-blue, I liked the contrast of sharp green;  this all added up to an emerald.*

*Everybody's an art critic.  My husband, an expert on minerals, looked at my design and protested, "But no gem cutter would ever give an emerald a round cut like that!"   

At right: Triangles and rhomboids in just four shades 
of paint can suggest an emerald: black, dark green, pale 
green, and white.  If you have trouble, use a photograph,
above, to make the facets hold still.  It's a good exercise  
in painting what you see, not what you think you see.  

Paint

Paint

   

Don't plant TOO many clues

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 

A second draft of IV: 5 - 9 

This second draft of "One Gem," building on the landscape idea, got too complicated, since, in making it look more like the silhouette of a mountain range, I also made it harder to read.  The voice seemed to go up and down, and it wasn't always clear which line to read next.  (Whenever I see readers tilting their heads to read, I know I need to simplify my layout.)  

Other design aspects work better in this draft.  I tried out a blue ink;* it has to be dark enough to still have tone left when I dilute it for the small, faraway letters.  And I've started playing with the curled descender of the small g in "gem."  I think I can fill it with--what else!?--a gem.     

* FW Acrylic Indigo Blue.  

  

See the Song of Songs exhibition in Boston this autumn

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 

Margaret Shepherd's monumental project has rendered
this unique book of the Bible into modern calligraphy.  

Twenty-eight designs from The Song of Solomon are now on exhibition at First Church Boston, September  24 - November 19, 2017.  

You are invited to the Artist's opening 

October 13, 5:30 - 7:00.  

Future showings will add more verses 

until completion in 2020. 

Calligraphy maps a landscape, in half a dozen ways

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy.

This scripture practically designed itself, and gave me a chance to use half a dozen techniques that all visual artists employ to add the third dimension to their two-dimensional work.   
I was enchanted by these verses, about a young man coaxing his lover to come down from the hills where she lives with lions and panthers.  I started by laying out the lines of text out like a mountain range.

IV: 8 - 9 Rough draft.  

An initial rough layout, pasted up quickly with lines of type, showed me that using progressively smaller letters could suggest mountains farther and farther away.  I filled in the O spaces with purple to see if they would look like gems in the landscape and found that not every bright idea works the way I'd like.  And the text explicitly refers to "one gem,"  Back to the drawing board.

I needed more ways to reinforce the illusion of depth, beyond simply making the letters smaller.  

Remind yourself to look hard at what you actually see
in a landscape, rather than what you think you see.  

Landscape painters learn that when things get farther away they become:

• Less contrasty
• Lighter in tone
• Grayer all over
• Cooler color 

Other ways to create the illusion of 3-D on a 2-D surface can include:

• Overlapping of diagonals
• Convergence of verticals 
• Closer to the top (the horizon) 

And in some mountain landscapes, mist collects in the valleys. 

  

9. 18 And another final thought on translation

Song of Solomon: timeless love poetry in contemporary calligraphy. 

I’m only human.  Sometimes I just choose a translation to fit the demands of the layout — not only to suit its tone but to actually provide me with the letters to design it with. Remember that medieval scribes loved to letter Beatus Vir because the initial B offers so much potential for design.  And all calligraphers like to encounter passages that offer us a Q, Z, or other favorite letter to work with. 

IV: 9

Detail 

For instance, several translations of Song of Solomon make a comparison to "one chain," "one jewel, " one link," or "one bead" of the beloved's necklace.  These are all accurate, but I chose "one gem" because the g just looked like a natural part of the necklace.

Some other graphic reasons for choosing the translations I choose: 

That "BELOVED" in the first
line of I: 15 seems more like a
dove than "How beautiful
you are" or "Ah, you are
beautiful" from other versions. 

• For overall length; sometimes the design wants lots of words, sometimes only a few.  
• For emphasis; a design may highlight the end of the quotation rather than the beginning. 
• To put a ascender or descender where I need it for decorative effect.  
• For the word or initial it starts with.  For instance, consider: I am my beloved’s and he is mine vs My beloved is mine and I am his.   For calligraphers, I is a less interesting letter to work with than M.