A weekend workshop

It was a warm and wonderful weekend in Brisbane with fellow travellers and calligraphers, gathering to learn Pointed Pen Versals with Colleen Little.  It was an intense two days. You know those days where you arrive home and can only mutter and murmur, barely string two words together let alone form a sentence?  My head was tired, yet full of adventures to come.

Colleen was well-prepared and patient, and pushed and stretched us and challenged over the two days. Which is good. But tiring. You never want to walk away from a workshop going oh, well that was easy and I knew that already. I came home with loads of ideas, tips, tricks, techniques and wonders which will keep me going. So many things I learned!

Here are some of the techniques we developed along the way.

Starting way back with skeleton Romans; the hardest of letters to get right despite their seeming simplicity.

Lots of worksheets and letter proportion and spacing to think about.

Adding different serifs to formal Romans.

Then beginning to de-formalise, and remove serifs.

And then to pressure-release with pencils, and then with the different pointed pen nibs.  I discovered I am somewhat heavy-handed and kept breaking my pencils with the pressure part; and releasing way too much ink from the nib with the pens, creating lovely little ink-mountains in each letter! Laugh.  I write notes to myself all over the pages which helps remind me down the track what was going on.

In between we prepared some pages with water and ink, and loosely formed lines for some writing.

We worked so hard and the goal wasn't to do finished pieces - it was to try techniques so there are several half-finished words and works in my book. On the last exercise I got to draw the outlines of some of the letters, but there is much to do to complete them. But yes, the workshop was finito!

Thanks to the Calligraphers of South East Queensland for organising such a great workshop and for hosting Colleen and feeding us lunch on Sunday - delicious and greatly appreciated!

LATE ADDITION UPDATE - I forgot to say that I wore my old tried and trusted apron...just felt right to make a mess in. I think I need to wear Rosalie at home and get her mucky before taking her out in public!