Methods and Madness

A personalised phantasmagoria. Made, published and tampered with by Yasmin McCall - UX and Web Designer in Australia. I go weak at the knees for good typography, geometric patterns, unusual photography and delicious coffee. 

[yelizabeth]

Tune. 

[yelizabeth]

17/100 | Submission of Characters

I’ve taken so long to post this up it’s embarrassing. After my practice with both Capital & lowercase characters I pieced together one page with two of each character (in pencil still) and posted it for feedback.

The feedback I received was positive and suggested I focus on slanting some of my characters (namely B, E, U) so they aren’t quite so upright and to bring the top of my lowercase r up over the waistline. 

This, plus putting these characters into pen are what I’ve been working on since then. Those shots are still to come, but for now here is a clearer shot of what I submitted. (Yes the Z is missing, it didn’t fit so it got left behind in this instance haha) 

[yelizabeth]

Day 13, 14, 15 & 16 | 100 Days of Calligraphy | Capitals & Lowercase

The last 4 days of calligraphy have been working on Capital & lowercase characters, back to pencil of course, to get the shape right. I found Capitals particularly difficult & I’ve still only just got the hang of how to deconstruct them into separate strokes added together. 

Day 13

You can see me struggling with angles, curves, thickness etc. I really didn’t expect how much of a challenge this one would be. 

Day 14

In this one, particularly with the G & f’s I had to realign with the ascender & descender lines. I had a better time with the lowercase, I think all the stroke practice I’ve been doing leant itself naturally to these shapes. 

Day 15

Today I’m starting to recognise repeating curves on the Capital characters. I’m feeling pretty confident with the lowercase characters, I think that’s clear because I started putting emphasis on the thick to thin strokes.

Day 16

Day 16 I got a lot more done because I had more time and I was starting to get the hang of how each Capital character came together. 

I really enjoy the lowercase q (below), I really struggled with the lowercase r and the capital T. 

This third lot (below) I breezed through, not saying they are perfect, but by this point I had already created these shapes in other characters and found my ‘calligraphy muscles’ getting stronger. 

The curls on the U, V & W are all much stronger than Day 13 as well. 

Since these days I’ve already done up two pages with all the characters on them & submitted it to my course. But more about that later.

[yelizabeth]

Day 12/100 Days of Calligraphy

I submitted the pieces from my last post into my course for feedback and I mentioned that it felt like all the beginnings and ends of the strokes felt unfinished.

It was suggested I check out a video they sent me that demonstrated how to open up one of the tines by putting pressure on the other, this caused a very blunt straight edge on the stroke. This made up my practice for day 12, I started practicing this with simple strokes, taking a while to get the hang of it.

Quickly got bored of this & instead started practicing it on the ‘i’ stroke.

 finally, I applied it to the ‘a’ using an ‘o’ stroke and then adding the straight ‘i’ - you can see in the little clip below that the first time I turned the nib a little to help, but the second I properly just opened up the right tine. 

Still got so much to post next time

[yelizabeth]

CALLIGRAPHY CATCHUP PART 2

As promised, here is part 2 of my calligraphy catchup. I decided to separate these into two parts because after uploading the previous pencil practice I moved back to pen because my course had positive feedback and suggested I start with pen work. 

Day 9

Revisiting ink and nib I found myself approaching each stroke very differently. Previous practice I was using thick strokes to start and oddly timing my thin strokes. Pencil practice certainly helped me get the shape right, then focus on the thickness. 

I got one page of practice done at my parents, while my mum made me soup & cake (so spoilt!) 

Day 10

Today I completed the second page of strokes in ink and uploaded the two into the course gallery. Here I was definitely having a lot of shaky troubles with the rounded curves, though the feedback I received was not to worry,  that my ‘calligraphy muscles’ would strengthen and it would improve. 

Day 11

I spent my Sunday (3rd May) doing a lot of prepping for the upcoming week, including a lot of food prep and experimentation. One such creation was this coconut & mango granola using delicious spice mixed in with coconut milk before roasting which surprised me. 

I made this little tag to attach to this jar of granola I made for one of my best galpals, I was pretty happy with my efforts, though I have found you really need to focus on the character after as well as the character you are working on - this is how I stuffed up two of the ‘n’s because I wasn’t thinking ahead #lessonlearnt

I’ve also never done any capital characters before so that M & G were a bit of a challenge. 

I’ve got more I’ve been working on the past few days so stay tuned. 

[jewist]

[yelizabeth]

that texture & colour. 

[ellanmwebb2]

Cloud details : Sneak peaks for the upcoming zine ‘passing’ @Mafroo

[salvalopez]

[yelizabeth]

Calligraphy catchup part 1

It’s been almost 2 weeks since my last Calligraphy post, I fell of the bandwagon for the first week and although I haven’t been posting this week I have been practicing all this week - so picking up from where I left off (I intend to do 100 days even if it takes me 200) here is a little catch up session:

Day 6

I went back to the basics (as stated in my previous post) I’ve been using pencil and repeatedly sketching out each basic stroke using the guided lines from my course. 

Day 7

Much the same as day 6 - going over the basics in pencil, here I’m trying to focus on heavy to light strokes. 

Day 8

I decided I had better start uploading some of my work to my course because I only have two weeks left (they give me feecback) so day 8 was repeating each basic stroke in pencil to submit. Below is what I submitted:

After this the feedback I received was positive (though I need to straighten out the S swell stroke) It was suggested I start with pen, so I moved back to pen & ink. I’ll upload those parts later. 

Catchya

[yelizabeth]

Days 3,4,5/100 Days of calligraphy

Here’s a quick combo post of the past three days of calligraphy. 

Monday was the last day of my mini holiday from work so on Sunday (day 3, when I wasn’t home) I had a bit of a pencil /notepad sketch playing with the strokes I’ve been practicing to make up characters. 

This one went up on instagram. (yessss I am aware I spelt holiday without the ‘a’ there hahaha *face palm*) 

Monday I was so caught up in things I sadly managed to miss my calligraphy for the day. Though today’s sketch (day 6) really speaks for itself:

As previously mentioned, I was needing printer access to continue the assignments for my course - so with those you can expect a lot more back to the basics while I start working on learning them better. These few posts have been me jumping the gun a little (moving straight to words) but they we’re fun to play with anyway so who cares :P 

Basics tomorrow 

[jackvanzet]

[aessestudio]

[yelizabeth]

3/100 days of calligraphy

Bit of a smaller piece today, I have a few assignments to do for my course but I need to print stuff out for it so I’m on standby until I go back to work (i.e. have printer access) 

Today I tried my last unused nib, it is a Joseph Gillott 404. I found it a lot thicker with the hairline strokes and all together a lot rougher in flow, but still got some nice strokes out of it. 

I started practicing joining strokes and jumped right ahead (impatient me getting the upper-hand) to combining some of the basic strokes I’ve been working on - o’s, j’s and i’s though they are still pretty rough - see image above. 

I also went though a part of the course going over how to hold the pen, which handy considering my cramping hand yesterday - probably was gripping too hard haha. 

over & out

[jerblake]

ocean song #7 jeremy blake

[yelizabeth]

2/100 Days of Calligraphy

Last night I started out with the oblique holder (on the left) and was making good progress. This morning I tried out a different nib and the straight holder (right) and surprisingly found it more difficult. I didn’t think I’d notice fine differences this soon but the nib definitely acted differently (the nib I like is supposedly good for heavy hands? haha damit) I also found my hand cramping quickly using the straight holder. I switched back to the oblique holder and tried another nib. 

Aside from the lack of hand cramping, I like the oblique holder because I find it easier to position the nib straight onto the paper (with the straight holder I kept rotating it sideways). 

Anyway, today I focused on getting the right stroke width on the ‘o’ stroke and trying to maintain the angle on all my strokes, even in this little clip above, my L’s are a little to vertical - but they are starting to come together. 

see ya tomorrow

[yelizabeth]

#100daysof...

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted any of my own content on this blog. I’ve decided to change that for the time being and take up the suggestion from friend/college/wiz with words; Liz to partake in the 100 Days Project (slightly late I’ll add, it started on the 6th April and it’s now the 9th). 

Recently I’ve taken a little time off work for some R&R and in my free time I started taking a calligraphy course. So for my 100 Day Project I’m doing #100daysofcalligraphy (learning). 

So this is day 1 of the challenge, it’s also day night 1 of my course, and here is a little shot of my progress. 

I have a tendency to be a pretty impatient person, and whenever in the past I’ve attempted calligraphy I’ve always just jumped in and started putting things on the page in my own cursive handwriting. I found it pretty difficult to convince myself that I needed to take it slow this time and so you’ll see me randomly scrawling my name and such but I found once I got into it, those little rounded strokes are pretty addictive. 

until tomorrow folks

[o-bee]