Publications

“One-point tools,” p. 9
Rhythmical movement as patterned play—using a ballpoint pen!

• As meditation. Integrating the breath with the moment-by-moment act of stroke making helps you stay present and slow down. An emphasis on the process of creation helps you develop awareness, relax the mind, and invite the imagination.

The Prototool: Beginning with your index finger, your body makes direct, unmediated contact with a surface. This experience with touch and movement prepares you for using an actual tool — for guiding strokes as an extension of your body, as expressions of your own body’s unique language.

One-point tools: Pencils and roller balls. These familiar tools help you get comfortable with moving and directing a tool. Making basic directional strokes with them, you become aware of the quality of your movement — its energy and potential for connecting you with your mood and spirit. “One-point tools” includes sitting at a desk, posture, paper, and tool hold. This tool category features the training alphabets of Playball and Jumprope. (see below)

Stroke technique: The Conte crayon. This tool, a one-point tool with “bite,” helps you develop the quality of your contact with a writing surface. It works by awakening your senses to the pressure you exert upon a tool as you move it. The quality of your contact develops through exercises in applying and releasing pressure in patterns (even and uneven). It’s the key to finding calligraphic rhythm!

Using a tool with bite, the skillful use of pressure helps you participate in the “elasticity” of the stroke. Connecting with it in this way you receive its energy as you give it your own. Vitalizing letterform is a reciprocal act!

Start pressure — the first uneven pressure pattern.

“Graphopoeia” is a term my husband invented to describe the calligraphic process of translating a word — an aspect of its meaning — into visual as well as written language. In creating the word as an expressive image you develop both the basics of design and “calligraphic empathy”: an ability to identify with the direction of strokes and the posture of letterform as a felt experience.

Using the Conte crayon and “Jumprope,” the second training alphabet, you begin to explore the realm of calligraphic empathy. The first stage is literal interpretation, as in the word images below. This begins a process of cultivating your ability to experience written/verbal language in terms of graphic elements and felt gesture.

Two-point tools: Two one-point tools banded together. These comprise a shaft and a nib with two points. This nib is analogous to the edged pen’s two-cornered nib (see “The Edged Pen,” below). Two-point tool operations underlie both tools. Beginning with a two-point nib, without the challenges of using ink, prepares you for success and enjoyment with the more sophisticated edged pen. Two-point tools introduce partnering technique, see below. Using this technique, you partner with the tool, the better to dance with it — to more fully engage with and enjoy your movements!

Page 86, below, provides a basic “operator’s guide” for using a two-point tool / edged pen: the key — understanding nib angle.

Training alphabets

These are primarily invented alphabets rather than historical ones. They are especially designed 1) to cultivate the calligraphic lessons of each tool and 2) to train the eye to see alphabets as artistic languages. To help you explore these visual languages I’ve created a grammar I call the three Ds: design, ductus, and dynamics.

• Design acquaints you with the principles of design.

• Ductus shows you the direction and sequence of strokes: the map of a letter’s distinct territory.
• Dynamics guides you to direct sensory experience of this territory. Using dynamics, you embody the act of letter making.

Through the interplay of the three Ds you learn to express yourself calligraphically — awakening your aesthetic potential as you activate a dialogue between the senses, visual and tactile; bodily movement, and the mind.

Spacing

In this approach, spacing is an integral, organic part of studying an alphabet: not, as in conventional instruction, taught at the end. From the start, you’ll learn to see the space within a letter in relation to the space around and between letters. Individuals (letters) become social (words and lines) shortly after their birth as unique forms.

Plasticity

Calligraphy is not type! Plasticity — the inherent ability of calligraphic strokes to lengthen, shorten, and subtly change direction — helps you make legible texts as well as expressive ones.

Exercises

These learning experiences are the heart of this manual. They aim to develop your ability to 1) infuse form (the structure of a letter) with flow (the energy and rhythm that brings a letter to life), and 2) to organize letters into calligraphic pieces — whether a single word, line of words, or multiline text.

Attitude

Here, an open mind helps you enjoy learning — indeed, makes it possible! Please take a vacation from your past experience with calligraphy — whether a definition or years of practice. Go on vacation and let your natural curiosity energize you for an exploration of new territory. As meditation, this approach asks you to notice any thoughts that prevent you from being present. It asks you to slow down. Practice is a time to breathe — to discover, develop, and delight in your wholeness and creativity.

The alphabets

Grouped by tool category, the eleven training alphabets in this book are briefly described below.

One-point

• Playball features the joy of movement — freely throwing the stroke from your shoulder. You’ll use a “multiline” stroke, making a few throws in the same direction, to help you get the feel of the action and develop your aim. “Target practice” is introduced as a new method of spacing instruction.

• Jumprope features “making contact” — calligraphically. Through a curved, monoline (single-line) stroke, using the Conte crayon, you learn to apply patterned pressure to letterforms. By focusing on the quality of contact, your senses, thoughts, and feelings enter the creative process. Through guided exercises, mind, body and feeling are attuned to the rhythm and gesture of making strokes. Of infusing you and your letters with energy!

This book introduces “bowing” technique for calligraphers as a way for developing strokes as felt gestures.

• Jumprope caps introduce caps and their combination with lower-case letters. This alphabet carries the spirit of the small letters — eleven of these become caps merely by simple enlargement!

• Trapeze introduces a calligraphic hallmark: strokes varying in thickness. But, with a two-point tool, stroke gradations result from changes in stroke direction and nib angle, rather than pressure. Trapeze trains you int the in the foundation skill of holding nib angle steady — or “constant,” in calligraphic terns — as you move it in the varying directions of letterform.

Trapeze also activates a spirit of daring and play as you move frequently from one to two points to close the open stroke of a two-point tool.

Trapeze develops partnering, described in “Two-point tools” above. Partnering makes it easier to guide the tool—to experience “disciplined freedom.”

Trapeze continues to investigate the word as image. In the exercise below, you 1) choose a word, 2) trace its letters from the model alphabet; and 3) explore its expressive possibilities using plasticity (line and spatial relationships).

• Trapeze caps develop skill in changing from the one nib angle to another: here, as you move from one stroke to another. This second, or “adjusted” angle, is added to balance stroke weights and help you become fluent in angle changes between strokes. This expands your design/expressive potential.

• Moto, short for movement and touch, is the first edged pen alphabet. From a foundation in nib angle gained with two-point tools, you’re ready to meet the challenges of using ink. Moto’s exercises help you get thoroughly comfortable with this medium; with holding the nib at a constant angle to make its clean-edged downstrokes, and with working freely on a nib corner to make its rough-cornered upstrokes. They also develop your relationship to the edged pen, through partnering, and continue to provide lessons in spacing.

Moto continues our exploration of the word as a communicator of graphic meaning and the interrelationship between the verbal and visual.

• Moto caps further develop your understanding of letter structure, as well as your visual and manual sensitivity to nib angle. Although Moto caps are the same height as Moto lower-case, flatter nib angle and unique structure create distinct but compatible alphabets.

You’ll also learn to draw “angle lines” as aids to maintaining nib angle. This process introduces the use of protractor and T-square.

And, you’re now ready to begin nib turning with the edged pen. Here, you change nib angle within the course of a single stroke to thicken it.

• Satisfaction (yes I get some!) celebrates the foundation you’ve gained through previous training alphabets with its array of dance-like characters.

Letter structure joins other design variables to expand expressive potential.

• Satisfaction caps share the energetic, playful character Satisfaction’s lower-case — as well as eleven of its forms. To distinguish them, caps are now larger than lower-case and made at a flatter nib angle.

Two plastic relationships are considered as expressive choices:

Introduction to Italic

In contrast to the previous training alphabets, Italic is historically-rooted rather than invented. It’s presented here, at the end, because students now have sufficient skill to enjoy learning this sophisticated hand. The two versions — Upright Italic and Proteus — provide lessons in more advanced calligraphic techniques: ones which will allow you write an Italic of your own design or follow that of another.

• Upright Italic develops skill in smoothly graduating a stroke from thick to thin or vice versa. With an edged pen this action involves a successful transition from the nib’s full edge to its thin edge (or vice versa). To meet this challenge, I’ve developed an “edge shifting” technique. (see below)

Upright Italic also features nib turning within and between strokes.