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