My inspired artist friend; a lover of all things creative, recently sent me a calligraphy set. She is working hard to preserve the wonderful but dwindling art of letter writing. For a couple of years now she’s been perfecting calligraphy-style handwriting and trying to inspire me to do the same. Cards and notes from her are little works of art, often including water colour touches, photographic watermark images and envelops closed with personalized wax seals.
A beautiful, decorative box held everything to get me started; three fountain pens: each with a different sized nib, instructions for basic strokes and common scripts, lined practice sheets and even a tiny pointed sable brush for filling in large letters.
Maybe it’s the amount of time spent typing at the computer or being in too much of a hurry when I am writing but my penmanship could use some improvement. So I’m having fun practicing but precision is a long way off. Most important are gauging the space needed to accommodate what you’d like to write, relaxing the hand and not stopping mid-letter or mid-word. How amazing to think that for hundreds of years all the world’s knowledge of the time was painstakingly written down by hand. The Bible, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the romances of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere came to us through the ages this way.
The thank you note to my friend was passable but I’m quickly improving and am ready for a more ambitious project. I am going to calligraph a favourite poem for my niece’s upcoming birthday. It may end up being only a verse or two as artistic lettering takes more space than ballpoint pens and the potential for mistakes is considerable. Hopefully I won’t ruin too many sheets of lovely paper before I’m finished.
Elaborate, elegant flourishes characteristic of calligraphy seem to elevate the significance and importance of the message. I hope my niece likes her gift and that it will feel special to her. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to send her a calligraphy set too. Maybe she’ll enjoy practicing the art of beautiful writing too.
