Impetuous Italics with Manny Ling

Calligraphy by Manny Ling



The group relaxing at the end of the day!

It was our November workshop on Saturday with Manny Ling as our guest tutor. The theme for the day was Impetuous Italics and it was a fun and lively script to learn.

Manny started with a demonstration of the basic techniques - the strokes are much quicker than with formal italic and as your hand moves the pen it creates a natural and free movement, we found that's it's harder than it looks but with practice we were getting some good results during the morning. We also manipulate the pen quite a bit - lifting one corner edge of the nib to create fine lines and taper off on downward strokes - the examples by Manny at the end of this post show how this looks.

Throughout the day Manny gave various demonstrations and showed techinques to us, as we had a few members that couldn't make the meeting (sorry Heather and Moira) it meant that we had a lot of individual focus and help on our own work.

By lunch we had moved onto writing words and looking at how we consider what style of letter to write - basically as this is a loose and free script you can change the way you write a letter so it fits in with the whole word and the balance is right, different ways to write letter combinations such as ff, rf, st etc. all helped us to exlore and experiment with our own work.







Manny Ling demonstrating his lettering to the group





Mable and Cynthea working on their lettering



Manny demonstrating technique with Bernice

Susan Moor - Codex Amiatinus

During the October Quarto meeting we were also lucky enough to have a talk from Susan who is an amazingly talented calligrapher, she was commissioned by Sunderland University and St Peter's Church, in Monkwearmouth to reproduce two pages from the Codex Amiatinus Saxon Bible which was originally produced at St Peter's.

To read more about it and to visit the Church click here

Quarto October meeting

Well I was back off to Sunderland last week to the October meeting of Quarto - the Book Arts group I joined back in July. A bit daunting this time as I had to make my first book!!

We'd also invited another Book group called 'Bound to be Good' to visit us for the day. They are an offshoot from Calderdale Scribes.

The theme for the book swap was Windows and Apertures so I had decided to create a Tunnel Book that would have a window looking out onto one of my favourite views - Glastonbury Tor. Now this was the first tunnel book I'd made so it's a bit rough but I guess you've got to start somewhere (right??!!)









Well, as it's a swap group my Glastonbury Book went to Barbara from the 'Bound' group, I hope she likes it!!

I received a fanastic book from Anne - who loves all things Christmas!!







Everyone also brought along their previous books which had been made over the years, it was great to see such a varied and individual collection and truly inspiring. Everyone has such different styles and interests so even when you follow the same theme the books are very unique.

We also managed to sqeeze in making a book, thanks to Margaret Beech for this demonstration and providing all the paper. It was a really quick book to make but unusual in the rolled spine that you end up with. Starting with a sheet of A3 paper (although any size would do) you score folds and cut along a couple of lines, ending up with a the result below, we punched a couple of holes and tied ribbon through just to keep the spine rolled up. Brilliant!






The next meeting is in January and our book swap theme is 'Season's' so I'm busy thinking on that now!!