Since this was the 4 th or 5 th time
that I had taken Reggie’s Year Long class, I approached it
differently than I had the other classes. So, when it was homework
time, I was a lot of times influenced by the projects that I had
done before and many times I could not seem to come up with a new
idea or saying to put into a calligraphy piece.
Also, the
guild had not seen a lot of my previous work and so I often brought
to class things I had done before in his class. One was this little
accordion book, so I will now tell the story behind it.
Opportunity knocks and sometimes someone is there to answer. Come
project time, what should one do? So many choices, so little time!
How to put one’s ideas into calligraphy.
This little book
came about as our first granddaughter, Sarah, was going on two years
old. I had this lovely marbled paper; actually, I had a lot of
bought decorated and marbled paper, and still do. So, how to use
some of this nice paper- It reminded me of a forest, then I thought
of animals and alphabets and children’s books and was it then
possible for me to come up with a cute story about all those things?
Somehow, I devised the word Alphabetsaurius, which I thought and
hoped would not be too scary a name for a dinosaur, as I had
intended this book for Sarah. |
I looked up some pictures of
dinosaurs, got out some scratch paper, scotched taped some sheets
together and sketched a very long weird looking animal with a big
mouth and 4 sets of feet. Next, I added a writing line down the
middle that also extended outside beyond his mouth.Then I decided
what story could I make up that would include both letters and
numbers. Once I had my little story, I had to add a long tail, that
would have made too long a book, so decided to add the tail to the
“back side” of the book.
I then drew my Alphabetsaurius on
this gray paper, wrote out the saying, cut out the dinosaur and
pasted it onto the sheet of paper that I had cut out. Before this I
had done a lot of figuring ,like how tall did I want the book pages
to be, where to fold them, etc. When gluing, some of the lettering
that had been done in gouache seemed to bleed. Lesson one learned.
Glue first, then letter. Since none of the paper I used was that
wide, I had to do a lot of piecing together to get the size I
wanted. My original mock up had letters dispersed all over the
background, but once I got my story in the writing line, decided
that was too much. Looking back on what I did, I am happy with the
outcome, but wish I had added an extra fold so I could have put in a
colophon.
I never did give this book to my granddaughter, but
instead made her another one out of some of her drawings (actually,
they were just scribbles) onto which I calligraphed some of her
favorite children sayings and verses. |
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