Tips on storage

When involved in calligraphy you accumulate all kinds of bits and pieces, and its often difficult to quickly put your hand on the thing you want. Most of the bits and pieces are smallish, and will therefore fit nicely into old video tape boxes, which can stand on a bookshelf to make them easily get-attable (especially if they are filed in alphabetical order!)
I always save the tiny pots of marmalade you get in restaurants - they are ideal for mixing up small amounts of gouache. When you have finished, you simply allow the paint to dry out completely, and then you can put the lid on to store it for next time. Gouache reconstitutes well with a bit of water, and sometimes a drop of Gum Arabic.
The plain white Chinese bowl is ideal for mixing larger quantities of gouache, as it has a smoothly curved bottom which doesn't trap paint. It does need to be plain white in order to be able to properly see the colour you are mixing - a patterned or coloured bowl would be more difficult to work with. The chopstick rest makes a perfect brush- or pen-rest, and the spoon can be used for small amounts of contrasting colour.
The glass flower holder (usually found at the bottom of vases, to hold flowers to attention) is useful for holding brushes so that they don't touch each other.
The strip of ruflette tape is great for storing nibs. They tend to go rusty when stored in tins. The strip of tape can be rolled up to transport to classes.
If anyone else has devised their own ideas please let me know -

Provocative

I hope I don't offend anyone with this piece - I certainly don't intend to. I wanted to produce a piece of work which superficially looks "standard" but isn't really, when you look properly. I got the idea for the brown/blue/gold from a work done by a Spanish calligrapher, which I thought looked very pretty-pretty. Automatic + pointed pen, brown drawing ink, plus blue white and gold gouache. Now will I have the guts to hang it anywhere, I wonder?

Native American saying

Reading what Sheila Waters says about not always relying too heavily on pencil guidelines, I felt it was time I let go a bit. I don't think I have ever been brave enough to do anything without guidelines before, but I did this without doing any preparatory marking up at all. The Ojibwa symbol of the eagle I got off the 'net, and it was simply a case of making my lettering fit below the wingspan. (Pity it is not lined up a bit better.) So the lettering was done completely freehand, and I surprised myself! Close, but no banana.

Haiku

This is small - 20x9cm. For some time I have wanted to try making a piece with an oriental feel. Watching Massimo Polello's video "Latest works" on youtube gave me the germ of an idea, and the impetus to get going. By the way, Massimo is one of Italy's leading contemporary calligraphers.
I began by trailing a line of pva onto the paper, shook some dry black powder paint on top, and left it to dry. Contemporary artists often value unpredictability and randomness in their work, so I didn't try to control the drip of pva too much. Later, I shook off the excess powder paint, and wrote the haiku. The red pretend 'chop' gives the attribution to the author, Bosho, with his dates, and the square was made up with my initials and the year. I really do think it is important to give viewers as much information as possible about the work. When I look at any piece I always want to know who said the words, and when, and of course who made the work. I am not extatic about the finished thing, but reasonably happy.

Gloss-painted t-shirts!

Ok, we all know that there are perfectly good fabric paints available to make lettering on t-shirts, which is how it should be done, but I wanted to know what gloss paint would look like. From time to time I go out with groups of students to various exhibitions or places of interest, and I find it helpful to others to be able to pick out who is in charge, so I have several t-shirts bearing the word 'tutor' for this purpose. Having just finished painting my back door I thought I would utilize the paint that was left on the brush, before I cleaned it. I wrote the words with double pencils onto a wide piece of masking tape, and cut them out with a scalpel to make a stencil. I removed the letters and stuck them randomly on a black t-shirt, and put the stencil strip on the white t-shirt. (I like white-on-white - its not so in-yer-face.) I put a whole newspaper inside each, to prevent the paint from soaking through to the back, and dabbed my brush with the gloss on it over both sets of letters. Removed masking tape, and hung on the line to dry. They turned out ok, but I hope the smell wears off! It remains to be seen how they stand up to washing - not good, I should think.

(The letters are back-to-front because I took the photos myself in a mirror.)

Silly piece

I did this last year for my own amusement. I tried to make it in a 14th century manuscript style. Looking at it now that some time has passed I can see that the border is far too regular, and controlled. If you look at 14th century manuscripts you will see that they are far more uneven, and free, and spontaneous - and all the better for it, in my opinion. Mine is dangerously close to a Victorian copy - ugh! The Victorians, who were great copiers of mediaeval manuscript pages, always seemed to artificially tame their designs down, they obviously viewed the irregularities as imperfections. They had become accustomed to seeing the "perfection" of typefaces, and they expected everything to line up accurately, and right-angles to be 90 degrees, which they seldom are in the Real Thing. Admittedly, some of the distortion we see in ancient manuscripts these days is due to the inevitable shrinkage of the vellum over the years, but even so, I imagine that the majority of illuminators relied upon their judgement by eye, rather than using mechanical instruments. It is these very "imperfections" which give life to the manuscripts. Next time I will try and be brave enough to go for it, as they did, and fly without the reassurance of the safety-net (tracing).

Dream of the Rood

This is quite large - about 88x67 cm - done in 1995, the year that Mona Hatoum was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Some of her work was writing in pencil on a black background, and I was quite intrigued by this. You wouldn't expect to be able to read the lettering, with it being near-black on black, would you? I happened to have a large piece of board painted matt black, so I thought I would try writing in pencil myself. I've always loved using pencils, especially soft ones. Surprisingly enough, if you see the pencil-writing in direct sunlight it almost appears to be white!

Crayons

I haven't used coloured pencil crayons before in my work - well, not since childhood anyway - but there are contemporary grown-up calligraphers who do use them to great effect, the famous Sheila Waters for one. So this is a bit of an experiment. I wrote out the three lines in skeleton caps, overlapping each line, and then coloured in the interstices. I quite like the way that the reading of the words is concealed. If you want to know what they are, you really have to look hard. This piece has a very dated (Bauhaus?) look, not appropriate to the 21st century. Could do better!

Intro

I am a calligraphy tutor, working primarily for Birmingham Adult Education Service. I also teach at The Pen Room, a small museum of pens and writing equipment in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, on Saturday mornings. I originally set up a blog for each of my classes, so that when inspectors wished to see samples of finished work I could show them online, rather than have students carting their stuff around. It also meant that students could easily show their work to friends and family far and wide. I deliberately chose NOT to put people's names on the blog, for security purposes - you can't be too careful! And then, of course, I thought, why don't I make a blog of my own work? So I did - magistrauk. I didn't think any text was necessary. This is now changing, and I realize that it may be helpful, both to my students and anybody else who is remotely interested, to be able to read a written commentary on how my work is made, what inspired it, whether it went well or not, and any other tit-bits of information, so here goes (though I can't promise it will be updated all that regularly!)

For my most recent project I wanted to do a piece containing only capitals - majuscules - and lots of them. I had a plain picture frame big enough for the job, so what was I going to put into it?

At this point, I am duty bound to point out that I ALways tell students that it is not a good idea to make your work fit a particular picture frame, as it may cramp your style, but hey, I suspect we all do it from time to time! I had recently been listening to the Cambridge Cathedral Choir singing the Miserere, and looked up the Latin words, so I could follow it more closely. Mmmm, quite a lot of words... maybe I could arrange them on a page - a big page. I made a rough draft and divided them into three lots. I chose to do away with all punctuation, and in order to make the right side justified I wrote to the end of each line, irrespective of the broken words.

The largest paper I had to hand was lining paper, so I ruled a strip of it up, and using Chinese liquid ink, I began. Dash! The first letters went fuzzy - blast it - due to overloaded pen. Anyhow I decided to press on regardless, and subsequent letters did not bleed into the paper so much, except for when I re-filled my pen, of course. Got to the end without any further catastrophes (except for potential spelling errors - I have little Latin and no Greek! In fact, I nearly wrote on the bottom "page loaded but with errors"!)

So I set it aside to dry. When I came back to look at it later it was obvious that it needed something more, but what? What did the words say? It was all about sin and repentance, so how about an enlarged Q (for questio) set partly on and partly off the text? Yes, but that meant that the tail would have gone off the edge of the frame. Ok then, why not turn it round, back to front, then the tail would conveniently swoop over the lettering. Then I realized that it would be God who was asking the question - what is it you have done that you need forgiveness for? So of course, the back-to-front Q was God's-eye-view, a reference to mediaeval illuminators who sometimes wrote upside down 'so that God could read the words'.

Obviously the only colour to use for this big Q was gold gouache, made thin enough not to obliterate any lettering beneath. How to make the Q? I could have drawn a forward-facing large Q directly on to the work, but I couldn't do a backward one!

I got a plain piece of paper, and strapped two Sharpies together with a box in between to make them wider apart - the colour goes through to the back of the paper, giving me the backward shape. Then I went over the shape I had just drawn using a soft pencil, placed it where I thought it should be, and traced over the backward shape with a hard pencil. All that remained was to paint the gold. Job done.

I normally cut a mount for framed work, but in this instance the frame is quite large, larger than my Logan mat cutter could handle, and in any case for once in a way I don't think a mount would add anything to the overall appearance. Also, because it was carried out on inferior paper it is not likely to be around for a long time, so I have left it as it is.