Exercises

 I have been able to spend a bit of time in the studio doing the exercises from Brody's online Expressive Line class. I am yet to complete the assignments, but I have really been enjoying working my way through these ideas and these techniques.

To begin, I thought I should test and trial a variety of papers, so I spent a bit of time cutting down the different sheets and labelling each one.

You can see from the graduating looseness of my writing that the exercises take you from your own handwriting  through to a very loose and expressive line - just like it says on the packet.

With the final part  a real meander - upside down and round about.

The bit that REALLY caught me was the going back in and adding thicks to places - and sometimes unusual places and shapes. I loved how this made the lettering dance.

Along the way Brody swapped from a thin nib to an Automatic pen, and recommended putting a small piece of sponge inside to act as an ink reservoir. A good plan when you are turning your pen on its side (i.e. the ink doesn't fall out).

In the end I didn't like what I could make my Automatic pen do, but did enjoy working back into it a bit. I think if I use this pen I would just use a fragment like this - the cropped image - as I couldn't make the whole look lovely.

At the end of a couple of day's practice.

I then tried to use a bunch of different pens  to see what might happen and it was a really useful task. Some were too wobbly, some were too rigid; it was all very Goldilocks-y really!

Apologies for the clarity of those last two shots - they are actually quite large files and I don't know why they just went all pixelated...

There is plenty for me to work with here I think. I also enjoyed developing another style of writing which is going places too I hope. I will try to do my assignments with one or both of those for starters.  I am also yet to even do three of the other exercises so more than enough to go on with.