Vellum examples

At our May workshop John had brought with him some stunning examples of work on Vellum, the first here is a commission that Margaret Daubney produced - the client took the other version of this one.







Margaret had also commisioned fellow calligrapher Ann Hechle to produce this piece of work for John - it was a treat to be able to see this up close. Ann had also given John a series of detailed information about each of the squares that she had researched. Brilliant!



Following on from this John also had some of the tester pieces that Margaret had worked on - it's useful to be able to see the tests as so often all we see are is the finished version in a book or exhibition and we're left guessing how it developed and progessed into what we see. It maybe takes away some of the mystery but as an amatuer I love seeing the rough layouts and ideas as it helps me to work through a project and idea's develop as I go along. Some won't work, and some will but unless you follow them through how do you know this?

Photos from Kirkby Stephen Poetry Walk workshop

here's some more photos taken from our workshop day - they are the various layouts that the group was working on during the day.

Kirkby Stephen Poetry Walk - workshop

Today was our much looked forward to workshop with John Ward - on the Kirkby Stephen Poetry Walk. A series of 12 stone carving marking a year in the life of a sheep farmer, the lettering is carved by Pip Hall, a local artist to Cumbria.

Below are some of the examples from John's stone rubbings, you can see that he traces the letterforms from the original rubbings and then uses these to develop a piece of his own work.





After tracing the letter forms that John had produced from stone rubbings, we then looked at constrasting the large letters with the rest of the poem (or just part of it). Cutting the letters out and messing around with the layout is a great way to get a feel for what works, taking pics on a digital camera lets you move words around and keep a reference each time - brilliant time saver!







John also talked us through the use of vellum and he had brought with him some stunning examples of work which I'll add to the blog over the next week....