A little more disciplined

It’s been nearly a year since I took out my Italian calligraphy pen that I had stashed away for years, and scratched away my first wobbly pieces of work. I’ve been writing away ever since, making things up as I go. Last month I finally took a two-day calligraphy workshop in Copperplate, the type of lettering you often see on invitations, certificates, wine labels too, and tried to unlearn all the bad habits I developed. It was really great! I learned to slow the writing process way, way down. And it’s not even writing. Calligraphy is really drawing, which kind of blew my mind. It is so true though. Letters turned into shapes, and as we concentrated on how to draw each shape properly, we found ourselves easily making spelling mistakes in the process.

We spent the first hour just tracing the instructor’s writing of the alphabet – lowercase first – and then spent all day just writing in lower case. The second day we did the same with upper case letters. 16 hours of non-stop drawing and the occasional personal instruction: hold your pen this way, pick up your pen on the upstrokes, bear down hard on the downstrokes. Tiny instructions that made a huge difference on paper. It was heaven.

I took my newfound discipline and put it to work recently towards two very different clients.

The first client wanted something more conservative, and so I stuck with the traditional Copperplate lettering that I had learned in class.

The second client wanted something very whimsical for her Save the Dates envelopes. I lettered in all lowercase, alternating between script and cursive on every other line. Even though it isn’t formal looking at all, I definitely drew with much more intent and discipline than I might have before the class. I used the same pointed nibs as I always have, but this time I felt like I really knew how to control them and bend them to my will!