Book #2: Calligraphy

Before we started this project, we visited St. John's University and spoke with Matt who is the top guy to talk about when it comes to manuscripts and calligraphy. He showed us a million and one examples of different manuscripts dating back to as early as the 1500's. We got to see pages of the St. John's Bible, and other artifacts that had very different styles and textures based on the time they were made, or what the content was about.

When I made my book I decided that I didn't really want a theme to it when it came to the content. I just decided to use somewhat random quotes related to art, but I incorporated more of the style inside the book. I am not a very religious person, but I have always found quotes to be very alluring. So, for this book I thought that quotes would fit me better than bible verses.

I actually originally made one square book with ribbon binding. However, I completely messed up the entire framework so the inside leaflet was upside down, and none of the leading was the same and some of the words were becoming almost sideways because I didn't make lines for the 'type'. I hand wrote it all but I should have paid more attention to detail when it came to how the type was laid out. So I started over.

Materials:

I went back to Craft's Direct, bought some more 'aged' paper, about 5-6 'calligraphy' pens/markers, some mechanical pencils, and a glue stick I found in my junk drawer at my apartment. I also had some leftover ribbon from the first book that I used for the binding of the second one. I also had to buy a ridiculously priced $9 hole puncher just to make an 1/8'' hole for the binding. Pfft! Inflation. Honestly.

I also used a 'glitter' marker for some of the big letters in the book.

The annoying amount of markers I decided to use

The gold pieces that I used were from a piece of gold scrapbook paper, I couldn't find regular goldleaf.

The ridiculous Hole Punch

 

My process was a rough one. I started at home but remembered that I had to go to a wedding in North Dakota with family. Some of the book I actually had to do in the back of a 2 door Monte Carlo during a 5 hour drive (which turned out to be about 8 hours due to car trouble) and then the day we were leaving we had a family emergency right before we left so I couldn't work on it in the car since we spent most of the day in the hospital. We ended up getting home at about 10pm, and I finished the book around midnight.

Aside from all that though, I really did like calligraphy as a topic. I used to play around with my mom's scrapbooking markers and pretended that I could write really pretty. 

Overall, my favorite part of the book is the cover.
Here's the final product:

Process for Hand Lettered Typography Book

This hand lettered typography book contains transfers/traces of actual type that was printed off my computer. The idea was to show different font faces that interested me, relay quotes that related to typography, and also to examine the anatomy of type.

Materials:
scrapbook paper
thread and needle
permanent marker
black ink pen
HB pencil
eraser
graphite transfer paper
printed type (from computer)


Overall, I thought this project was very challenging and very time consuming.
I wasn't very thrilled with the turnout since I didn't have the time management skills to accommodate the amount of work that ended up going into the project. Had I had more time I would have gotten a lot more creative with it. I'm not really an arts and crafts kind of person so this type of thing is hard for me anyway.

Here are pictures:

Here's an example of the word documents I used to print the words / phrases so that I could trace them onto the scrapbook paper to make my book.

Here you can see where I was transferring some of the letters.

Here is the graphite paper I used to trace the letters.
It didn't really work that well because it was $4 for a 8 x 12 piece of paper. When I tried to erase my mistakes it wouldn't erase either so it must be some sort of heavy duty graphite paper.

Using a ruler was really inconvenient, so I used my library card instead to make the straight lines.

 I used Scotch Removable Tape so it wouldn't rip off my scrapbook paper after I was done tracing.

 My lamp by my desk, and my workspace.

Here's the final product:

Art 322

This blog is going to be listed for ART 322: Intermediate Graphic Design / 3-D Art Problems

I hope you enjoy my work.