calligraphy

For the calligraphy workshop we focused on the persual of calligraphic alphabets and visual demonstration working with a flat brush and ink. We had to draw a series of lines on our provided A3 pieces of papers and practice simple strokes: verticals, horizontals and curvatures. We also created letterforms following the given calligraphic forms as alphabet shapes. We started off with creating strokes to create the alphabet. To start with it was quite overwhelming because I try to avoid using a paintbrush as much as i can simply because i have a very unsteady hand so i became vulnerable to make mistakes easily. Painting is not like drawing where you can just rub out a mistake or go over it to fix it, and i'm the type to feel really down about messing up my work so i lose motivation to make it look good because i could not be bothered to start again.

When it came to calligraphy it felt way more different than painting. the strokes in calligraphy reminded me of studying mandarin in secondary school because Chinese characters involved drawing out characters in ink so i guess i did have some background in using ink. The more i practiced the strokes i began to understand the order in which the letters are drawn which made things much more easier. I enjoyed copying the Italic/ Chancery font  it almost looks like handwriting, you feel like you are Shakespeare... just writing the alphabet just without the plays and ... old english.

Once I got the hang of writing the alphabet i moved on to take lyrics from a poem...(i chose a rap) and attempted to write out as much as i can from it and i must say i was very proud of the outcome. There were small minor mistakes but i did not really care i just treated it as if i was writing in pen, i just kept going. I was even able to copy the Prince of Persia title typography.