A New Year for WindWriters

Our guild generally takes the summer off, and regular meetings commence in September after school starts and all the hustle and bustle settles down, so we consider September to be the start of a new year for WindWriters.

Our guild is committed to the study of letterforms as a basic focus for all members.  Often we see guilds caught up in the periphery of calligraphy: focusing more on bookarts, paperarts and  calligraphy-as-art, which seems to be focused right now on distortion and illegibility.  While all these things are good, and we enjoy them, we decided several years ago to make letterform the number one priority for our guild.

We have concentrated our efforts on the study and use of Uncial for the past six months, and have had workshops and study meetings, culminating in final projects using Uncial.

At our September meeting we voted to concentrate on Italic in it’s many forms and variations for the next six months, and as you know we participated in two workshops to jump-start our calligraphy year.  Both Gina and Martin focused on Italic in the workshops they presented to us, at our request.  I think this has given us a head start on work for the first part of our year.

Several members expressed a desire to have part of each meeting devoted to practice, or working on projects using our chosen letterform, and I’m all for that!  It’s pretty easy to let a meeting either turn to conversation or run on out of all proportion to the importance of the subjects at hand.

Over the years we’ve tried to keep our meetings as informal as possible.  We don’t have officers or dues and that’s fine with everyone so far, but we are willing to structure our meetings around the practice of calligraphy.  We’ll see how it goes.  Having a time structure might help us stay on track.

Just to start the year right, after the meeting I was asked to demonstrate a technique that Martin taught us for transfering  work to dark paper.  It was fun to have a bit of calligraphy to do, and everyone seemed pleased with the demo.  I used Annette’s name, written in Italic with dark blue ink on dark green paper.  The result was dramatic to say the least.  Since ink is transparent, the green of the paper influenced the color of the ink, making everything seem very coordinated.  The effect would have been very different if I had chosen a light colored gouache, for instance.  It was gratifying for me to see everyone talking about the limitless possibilities of one simple technique.

Next time:  Possible Workshops for our Year