295 Poinsettia

Remember Leafy Green from last week?  You can turn it into Poinsettia.  Rinse out your pen and write these pointy italics with red ink to imply the Christmas-time flower.  You can add a few green leaves, and make yellow dots to strengthen the illusion.  And notice how to spell this often misspelled word.

Christmas cards, conventional or innovative

Gothic letters are inspiring to design with.  Their medieval flavor is closely identified with Christmas customs, which mainly came from Germany via 19th century England.  But also, their abstract hexagonal shape helps them express creative contemporary calligraphic layouts.  

The greetings above offer two different approaches: a conventional illuminated page with large capital and leafy border, or letters in white falling out of a midnight sky. You can experiment along the whole spectrum from the familiar to the unexpected.  

293 Leafy green

The pointed letter body we saw in Leafy [November 30, #283] can look even leafier in color as Leafy Green. 

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290 Edelweiss

One more variation on Flower Box, an empty outline that suggests the little white flowers of Edelweiss.  Make sure your joins are precise, and don't try to write too many letters.

289 Flora

Flora is a softer view of yesterday's Flower Box.  Like that alphabet, it is shown here in letter families to help you understand its structure.  

I first started designing this alphabet for a friend's landscape architecture firm; her initials MB lent themselves to being merged into one little character and then repeated.  The green color at right adds to the feeling of leaf and petal.  

288 Flower Box

Flower Box is a hard alphabet to just sit down and write.  I've broken it into letter groups, but even then, many of the letters don't really lend themselves to the overall principle of squaring off the circle, breaking each side into two strokes, and fitting them together with precision.  You'll probably want to do some of them differently.  
I find that I use this alphabet occasionally in a short word or logo.  

283 Leafy

Across, down, up.  

This alphabet, Leafy, shapes the basic italic a and b bodies into a pointed, organic leaf shape.  The down and up strokes slightly overlap at the tip of the leaf.  You can make the leaf narrower or broader to imply different species.  
Keep the pen angle steady at 45-50° to make the corners accurate.  

Final down stroke.   

Look at real leaves to absorb natural shapes.  

Preview of tomorrow's alphabet.  

251 Lowlight

Lowlight is so easy, and it creates such an odd illusion.  If you fill in the top, not the bottom, of any outlined letter with dark ink, it looks like the light is coming from below.

241 Raised Roman

In Raised Roman, the imagined edges of an invisible solid letter can be created by strokes of the broad-edged pen. 

• Raised Roman is constructed by laying paper over a simple Roman alphabet.  Even a narrow pen (here, one eleventh of the letter's height) creates the illusion of depth.
• The narrow pen actually makes corners easier to dovetail.  
• Note the slightly flared serifs.   
• Experiment with the pen angle to make the diagonals visible.  

I have always liked the imagery in this poem by Wallace Stevens.  Here, "the greenness of night lies on the page and goes Down deeply into the empty glass..."  I floated the lime green letters above a three-dimensional illusion made a Raised Roman alphabet. The title character is described as reading by his own light, an enchanting image, and the poem ends with "the fusky alphabet."

preview of tomorrow's alhabet.

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224 Lights out

Today's alphabet, Lights Out, honors the Equinox, when the sun's light starts its long decline.  This simple style creates the optical illusion of a three-D letter on the page.  

221 Secret identity/Nobody we know

I love the idea that letters have other identities they can slip into. Small d is p upside down, p is q from the back.  But maybe the letters have their own ideas...
Today's alphabet builds on Short Shadows, September 17 #221, to allow letters to reveal a whole other message.  Follow yesterday's steps, but choose different words, with the same number of letters, and allow for an extra step where you use a rough draft to work out the spacing.   

This design heads the last chapter in my book Learn World Calligraphy.

220 Long Shadow

Yesterday's Short Shadow can lengthen into Long Shadow, giving the impression of time passing.  Simply adjust the height of the guideline and the angle of the slant.  

To review, here are the steps: 

1. First write the simple black letters [here they are Roman but you can choose any style].  Leave space between the lines of letters.   
2. Add a pencil guideline twice the letter height.  
3. Add pencil lines at an angle (60° here) so the shadows will all follow the same slant. 
4. Write the slanted lines using gray ink.  Hold the pen at the same angle.  

219 Short Shadow

Sometimes I like to imagine that letters are vertical, stand-alone figures that can cast a shadow.  Here, in Short Shadow, they look like they do.  

Write this in four stages; 

1. First write the simple black letters [here they are Roman but you can choose any style].  
2. Add a pencil guideline halfway up the letter height.  
3. Add pencil lines at an angle (60° here) so the shadows will all follow the same slant. 
4. Write the slanted lines using gray ink. 

If your black ink is water-soluble, or if your gray ink is opaque, you may need to reverse the sequence.

  

212 Surreal Perspectives

These letters, Surreal Perspectives, are drawn from many sources to suggest initials that might add head-scratching intrigue to a design.  Type designers have had fun with the forms of M C Escher, who pioneered surrealism for many mid-20th century artists.    I've pinned one such font for you here.   

I'm sure that with a little online searching you can invent your own  surreal letters.  (BTW please excuse the off-straight T.)

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.   

166 Gothic Edge

Your eye seems to see the invisible edge.  As R Crumb says, "It's just ink on paper, folks."

Gothic Edge creates the illusion that the Gothic letter is a three-dimensional white solid slab on a white background, made visible by its shaded edge. As with many Gothic variations, this is easier to write if you have Plain Gothic (April 11) guiding the placement of your stroke.