Forgotten skills

 About a year ago, my daughter and her fiancé asked me if I would do the graphics for the place cards and seating layout for their wedding. They had already done a great job with the graphics for their engagement party, using Canva graphic design tool, but we thought it would be nice to have hand painted and hand-lettered graphics for the wedding itself.

When I was a Second Year architecture student, at the end of the year we had a review of all our work prior to the oral presentations, and my lecturers had advised me to erase every piece of lettering on my drawings and re-do them. In the process, my lettering became much better, but this is a skill I have not used for many decades. Nevertheless, I pulled out a couple of lettering handbooks and a calligraphy set that my brother had passed on to me.

A calligraphy handbook by Muriel Parker (1980)

These were great, both to remind me of the very specific techniques, and to give us a wide selection of typefaces. The one book also had a set of graded exercises which were excellent to revive my technique, which had become very rusty.

Some preliminary practice exercises

I found an old felt-tipped calligraphy pen in my tin of seldom-used stationery, which was great to begin with, as one does not have to wrestle with a fountain-pen nib, and it is much more forgiving when you are perfecting the angle of the letters. As you can see from the photo, my first attempts were very irregular as I struggled to get the angle and shape of letters consistent. I also had to experiment with the size of the letters, as this is quite dependent on the size of the pen nib - too small looks cramped, while too big can look spidery and the effect of the shape of the pen is lost.

My old Sheaffer fountain pen

A calligraphy pen nib is quite broad, and one quite often can buy sets of nibs of varying widths, each suitable for a particular size of lettering. Mine is a "medium" and I found, by trial and error, that 7-10mm was a good size for the body of the lower-case letters. I tried out a couple of colours within the wedding theme, royal blue (too bright), black (too intense) and finally blue-black.

The fountain pen gives a crisper letter than the felt nib

The shape of the nib allows one to have a broad down-stroke and a very narrow horizontal line, giving the distinctive typefaces, but one needs to have perfected the angle of one's hand to get a good result - the hand has to keep exactly the same position relative to the paper for the whole letter, and indeed for the entire piece of writing. This entailed daily practice for several months before I felt sufficiently adept.

The next challenge was the choice of paper. We had decided to use watercolour for the decorative elements, so it needed to be sufficiently textured to hold the watercolour, yet smooth enough for the calligraphy pen. We found the perfect colour and texture for the place cards, a mixed-media lightweight card that was a good compromise.

My own finished place card

The next challenge was the things that needed larger lettering - the table numbers and the heading for the seating layout. Even the largest calligraphy pen nib would have looked too spiky, so I had to revive another skills set - brush painted lettering. This is very rewarding, but takes some practice to keep the pressure on the brush even, and to have enough paint or ink on the brush for a whole letter. If you need to stop and start, you get a very awkward change in intensity that is very difficult to correct.

An early trial with brush-painted letters

After much experimentation with different sizes and styles of brushes, I chose a number 6 flat brush with an angled cut, which made the variation in vertical and horizontal stroke much easier to achieve than with a square cut.

The perfect brush, now quite worn out!

I opted to use watercolour for the brush lettering, mainly because we had accidentally bought some pearlescent paint which we thought would be a fun idea for the table numbers. In retrospect, though, I would use ink for brush lettering, as this would have been more consistent. With the watercolour, I needed to do some quite tricky touch-up.

One of the table numbers in its frame

For the seating layout, we had quite a difficult choice when it came to the cardboard, as there was not the same range that we had for the place cards. There was watercolour paper of sufficient thickness, but we were worried that this would be difficult for the pen lettering. The shop assistant warned me about the final choice of a pastel-paper finish, and it was while doing the brush lettering that I saw the problem. Within seconds of the first brush-stroke, it started "bleeding" as the very watery paint spread! 

Disaster!

Frantic remedial work with a paintbrush with plain water and a tissue resulted in a bit of a halo around the heading lettering, but I found that using paint directly from the pigment cube with minimal water was the way to go, so the rest of the lettering was much less stressful.

The last bit of graphic work was quite spontaneous. I had decided to make my daughter an embroidered handkerchief with a monogram of her initial and that of her husband. In many ways,  I feel that this was the most successful of all of the graphic work I did for the wedding, even though the "copperplate" style was something I had never seriously tried before.

Monogram design for a handkerchief

While it took many hours of practising, I enjoyed the whole process, so now the challenge is to keep the skill going. My one plan is to make hand-made cards for every occasion. This will also help to keep my watercolour painting in practice, but more about that in another blog.