Putting Pen and Paint to Paper

Throughout these months of isolation paper, paint, and ink have become my new best friends. I have created a lot of note cards over the last four months. My lettering still needs practice. Layouts are the hardest thing to master! There are a few obvious mistakes in the cards in the photo, but they are fine to send to family and friends. I need to purchase some good card stock, for now I am using some flimsy stuff that I have on hand. It's fine for practice work. At this point I prefer to spend my money on pens, something that I have always had a weakness for... now I have a good excuse to buy them!

The Week In Review

What a week it has been! We unloaded the gas kiln, had a snow day, and I worked through a few more letters in my modern calligraphy course.

We had a really good firing. The copper reds looked great. I have a few ginkgo bowls that I am pleased with but I haven't gotten photos yet. I had two piggy banks in this firing that weren't orders. I posted them to my Etsy shop and they both sold within a few hours. I can't seem to get ahead of the banks. I like to have a few in the shop that are ready to ship. I shouldn't complain... I guess it's a good thing.
We actually had a couple inches of snow this week. It's mostly melted now, except for in a few shady areas. I will admit, it did make for a pretty day. I am just happy that here in North Carolina we can enjoy the pretty and then it's gone. In New Hampshire we had winters where we didn't see the bare ground for months. A few days after fresh snow, we had to live with brown, dirty snow banks all along the roads.

I am now at the half-way point of the minuscules portion of my calligraphy course. Today was the letter m. I now know enough letters to be able to write my name.

I feel like a proud 4 year old.

I have been itching to do some letters in color. I ordered a set of large brush pens. There is definitely a learning curve with these. The tips are very long and flexible. I need to go back to the beginning with these pens and practice the basis strokes.  I guess I can compare it to learning to throw pots with stoneware and then throwing porcelain for the first time. As with any new skill, practice, practice, practice.

Tombow does make some small harder tip colored pens. I may have to breakdown and buy a set of those too.

This could become an obsession.

We have spent the week glazing and will fire the gas kiln over the weekend. We are so behind in our schedule! Jeff had a sink that blew up in the bisque firing and it needed to be re-made before we could glaze fire. Luckily the sink mishap didn't break any other pots in the kiln. The sinks can be problematic to bisque. We typically preheat one day, turn the kiln off over night, then fire extremely slow the next...often not finishing until 2 or 3 am the day after that. Even then, they sometimes crack. Aside from the sink problem, the crazy weather last week also set us back.

I have started on the second segment of my modern calligraphy class. This session we are learning to put together minuscules (lower case letters) using the basic strokes learned last month. We learn and practice a new letter each day. When we get to the end of the alphabet we will start on the majuscule letters (uppercase). The following segments will focus on putting words together and stylizing words. If I am not mistaken, the whole course will take until June to complete!

Wishing everyone a happy Valentines Day. Make it special, even if it's just for YOU!

Your never too old...

to learn new things!

Last year I promised myself that I would learn to do modern calligraphy. I have been making cards and mostly using stamps for greetings because I am not too confident with hand lettering. I found some basic info on youtube and played around a little. Last week I found an online course on the "teachables" platform. The first month to learn basic strokes is free. The next few months of lessons are reasonably priced and you can pay as you go. So now I have all these practice drills on nearly every surface of the house. Jeff patiently refers to them as my "sheet music". He is right... it does look like sheet music. Leave it to a musician to see that.

If you are curious, here is a link to the course: The Happy Ever Crafter

Now that I look at a photo of my drills I can see that my ovals on the left hand sheet look wonky. I guess I better get back to practicing those!