My favourite must-have calligraphy paper (includes giveaway)
Bureau Direct, one of my favourite UK stationery suppliers, is offering an exclusive giveaway of my must-have calligraphy paper: Rhodia and Clairefontaine Triomphe. Enter to win via the widget at the end of this blog post, but, for now, find out why these papers are my go-to calligraphy paper choices for practice and digitising. A quick overview of Clairefontaine and Rhodia paper is that both have an exceptionally smooth finish which is perfect for calligraphy nibs and ink. With a little research for this post, I learned that, while they are two separate brands, Clairefontaine is the parent company and produces the paper for both.
The official US Rhodia website states:
"The Rhodia pad... features superfine vellum Clairefontaine paper in white with an exceptionally smooth satin finish."
Why is Rhodia grid paper the best for calligraphy practice
There’s nothing quite like Rhodia paper for calligraphy practice. A high grade vellum paper, it’s by far the smoothest I’ve come across. If you were just looking at specs alone, the 80gsm weight of this paper belies its ability to heartily withstand just about any ink you want to splotch on it -- and the ink won’t bleed.
I have always used the grid-style in A4 format. It doesn’t have Copperplate’s 54 degree angled guidelines and traditional 3:2:3 letter height ratio (it’s 1:1:1), but the ease with which the ink glides across it lets me focus on specific areas for creating calligraphy letter forms.
For example, I might spend time on squaring my tops and bottoms — a difficult but very aesthetically pleasing skill to master. Or I might practice consistent straight lines
Or I’ll get in the rhythm with some underturns
Or belt out some ovals
Of course, you could opt for plain Rhodia paper and draw/print your own guidelines, but, for me, for practice purposes, the grid works out just fine.
Buy online from Bureau Direct
Rhodia Pad (no. 18) — £4.95 / pad (80 sheets) — plain, lined, grid and dot grid.
Why I love Clairefontaine Triomphe paper for creating digitised calligraphy
My go-to blank paper for writing calligraphy that I plan to digitise is now undisputedly Clairefontaine’s Triomphe. This 90gsm high white paper, like Rhodia, is exceptionally smooth and a dream under any calligraphy nib. When there’s so many factors that can influence whether your calligraphy ends up looking good or bad (apart from your own cruel self examination), I really appreciate having a foolproof paper to hand that will take any ink or nib I bring to it.
Buy online from Bureau Direct
Clairfontaine Triomphe (A4) — £3.50 / pad (50 sheets)
While these papers — from high quality French stationery brands — aren’t the cheapest, I’ve always found them flawless and so reliable that I’m happy to spend the money (and, when you break it down, they work out to around £0.07 per sheet). I do use other, more economical paper choices when working solely on calligraphy layout, but I’ll save that for another blog post.
Rhodia paper in action
Watch this clip of me writing "Rhodia" on Rhodia to demonstrate the paper's delightfully smooth texture (at double speed).
Giveaway: The ABC of Custom Lettering
A great place to start learning calligraphy
I don’t want to seem hyperbolic, but The ABC of Custom Lettering by Ivan Castro has changed my life; creatively, at least. For years, I have lamented my inability to progressively learn more scripts — the ones that make a great calligraphic foundation such as Roman Capitals, Italic, and, of course, Foundational hands. I don’t mean my inability to learn in the technical sense; I can definitely learn new things. I mean my inability to know where to start. To pick a script and go. To wade through the technicalities of pen angles and x-heights. To do it on my own at home as a full-time mum and working calligrapher.
A word from the author, Ivan Castro
I quickly realised how great this book was for me and thought I’d say thanks to the author, Ivan Castro, via email.
Me to Ivan:
I'm currently working through your latest book, The ABC of Custom Lettering, and wanted to send a personal word of thanks. In the three years since I started learning calligraphy (Copperplate script), it's the first time I haven't felt overwhelmed by all of the various hands that I should be learning as a great foundation. So, thank you.
Ivan to me:
You make a point in not being overwhelmed by a lot of information and different hands. After a few years of teaching calligraphy, I know that what a beginner needs is not one hundred models, just mastering three or four basic scripts. All the rest will be variations of that. So, thanks for getting the point and I hope it really helps you through the way of the pen.
Since 2014, I’ve focused my attention on Copperplate (English Roundhand), consequently using it as a jump-off point to its rule-breaking counterpart, modern calligraphy.
Use the ABC of Custom Lettering to better your calligraphy skills
The book is broken into two key sections —
Calligraphy: The written Word
The first section walks you through building a foundation of calligraphic skills, featuring five main models:
- Carolingian Miniscule
- Roman Capitals
- Italic
- Brush Script
- Blackletter
- Numerals
Lettering: Drawing Letters
The second section uses the calligraphic foundations you build in the first section to draw letters and create your own style and design. Example projects using Gothic Letter, Slab Serif and Script include a title for a musical movie, a logotype for a BBQ restaurant and a logo for a burlesque dancer.
I’ll be focusing on the first section of calligraphy in this blog post, with my primary interest in familiarising myself with a broader range of alphabets to see what suits me and where I might apply them in my working life. I’ve set a goal of working through a different calligraphic model each month, and posting my progress here.
Take a look at Korero Press's walk through of the book
The ABC of Custom Lettering Giveaway
As part of this blog feature, Ivan’s publisher has kindly offered some books to giveaway — an excellent opportunity for others to learn calligraphy and hand lettering, too. To enter, submit your entries via the widget below. It will require you to sign in and then check off each step that you take to enter (e.g. if you tweet something, you need to indicate that you’ve done it in the widget — it’s not automatically detected).
a Rafflecopter giveawayThe giveaway is open to anyone worldwide, so please do share with friends and family who you think would benefit from this book.
Learning Carolingian (pronounced Caro-lin-jian)
Materials I used for practice
Ink: Parker blue ink (for my near-daily letterform practice).
Paper: Goldline layout paper (links to Penman Direct), a very smooth 50gsm paper that you can see through but doesn’t bleed. It allows you to see your guidelines easily underneath the really churn through your practice.
Nibs: Manuscript Tape (3mm) bought many years ago in a student calligraphy set (links to Amazon.co.uk). I wouldn’t necessarily recommend these nibs, but they did serve me just fine to begin.
Holder: When I have to use a straight holder, my go to is this cork-tipped one (links to Amazon.co.uk).
How the ABC of Custom Lettering helped me prosper
I was surprised, but pleasantly, that the first script to try my hand at was Carolingian. I was expecting to be launched in with the big guns such as Roman or Italic. Having heard only the slightest mention in my travels (via Joan Quiros and Amanda Adams) of Carolingian, I have to admit I felt that the pressure was off. I had no preconceived idea of what my alphabet should look like, so very much focused in on Ivan’s direction without the constraints of expectation. Suddenly I had grasped a broad-edge nib alphabet without much fuss at all.
My struggles with Carolingian script
One of my main challenges with this hand was having no concept of overall proportions for the script. This is no fault of the book’s. When writing in Carolingian, my words would always end up much longer than I anticipated and completely misaligned. I’ve spent years learning the ways of the much finer pointed pen, so, of course, my brain tries to overlay that information. This is purely something only time and practice can fix.
The other issue I had was trying to get my head around scale. Maths has never been my strong point, and the pointed pen doesn’t require adjusting for nib width, so, unfortunately, Ivan’s explanation of drawing up my guidelines and applying it to different sized nibs and scale didn’t correlate with how my brain works. I wanted to recreate the variations of scale Ivan had outlined, but I struggled to adjust my scale for playing around with varying x-heights. I chatted to a calligrapher friend who is familiar with this script and she told me that, as varying the scale of the script created a more modern effect anyway, I could play around with working out what ascender and descender heights worked for me.
Carolingian calligraphy after a month of practice
After my month of focusing on Carolingian (and this probably actually amounted to about two weeks of daily 30-min practise, really), I’m really happy with how I’ve progressed and confident about using this script when it’s called for. I’m looking forward to mixing majuscules with it to see what works best. Stay tuned as I progress through the scripts in coming months.
Some examples of Carolingian in practice
I have been writing birthday cards to friends this year, and decided to use Carolingian combined with Copperplate or Spencerian scripts to highlight recipients' names.
A post shared by Kate Watson 🇬🇧 (@oliveandreid) on Jan 17, 2017 at 2:50pm PST
A post shared by Kate Watson 🇬🇧 (@oliveandreid) on Feb 9, 2017 at 4:34am PST
Giveaway — The Joy of Lettering: Negative letters
With thanks to Quarto publishing, you have the chance to win The Joy of Lettering: A creative exploration of contemporary hand lettering, typography & illustrated typeface, Gabri Joy Kirkendall and Jaclyn Escalera's new lettering book. Find out how to enter at the end of this blog post. As part of my upcoming overall review for The Joy of Lettering, I've selected three projects to dedicate time to and see what transpires. In addition to giving you a walk through of my process, I'll be rating each project difficulty (easy/medium/hard), duration and accuracy to step plan.
Negative lettering
Duration - (I took approx 2 hours excluding practice)
Difficulty - (medium)
True to step plan — Yes. I added a couple of extra steps of my own, but you could definitely follow as instructed.
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1. Planning your negative space and doodling
I haven't done any doodling/zentangling for a really long time, so I gave myself an extra step of roughly sketching out and getting in the zone. When I searched for zentangling ideas, I learned (from WikiHow, no less), that this art form is as much about the journey as it is the outcome. It is a meditative process, and definitely one that is going to take time. But hopefully the time you take is mentally restorative. So...worth it. I also learned that a zentangle shouldn't really be planned, but should evolve (which is why the rough draft isn't finished... I just wanted to get to a point of confidence before putting pen to paper).
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2. Preparing your paper and letters
I knew immediately when I saw this project in The Joy of Lettering that I wanted it to be for a newborn baby boy, and that I wanted it on navy card stock. This added an element of difficulty for me because I couldn't just whip out my black ink pens and doodle away on some white paper. I was going to have to use white or metallic ink so that the zentangle would show. I decided I would use Finetec's metallic watercolour paints and apply them with a Nikko G calligraphy nib (in a straight holder).
Even choosing an A5 piece of card, I knew the doodling could take a while, so I took a shortcut with my letters and simply printed out the word in a font I liked at a size that fit.
I applied chalk to the back of the paper, then lay that on my card and traced over the letters with a soft (2B) bluntish mechanical pencil (Faber Castell TK9400). I then drew a very (regrettably) rough oval shape around the lettering in soapstone to contain the doodles.
Chalk applied to the back of paper in order to trace lettering onto dark card stock
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3. Doodling around your negative letters
I won't lie, I was a little daunted about how I was going to fill all of this space and have it look good. So I broke it down into manageable pieces with the help of my Finetec palette of colours. Each colour could represent one or two doodle styles, so I could just work through each colour block and build it up that way. It really allowed me to stop thinking too much about things and just be serious about my meditative lettering.
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4. Finishing up
The final thing for me to do was to clean away the chalk (with a soft tissue or cloth) so that my negative letters took pride of place, and to add the little one's birth details in gold copperplate calligraphy beneath. You could easily add a frame (I bought one from Fielders, Wimbledon, courtesy of the Ready Made Picture Frame Company, and cut my own mount to fit the A5 card stock from their offcuts).
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Enter the Joy of Lettering giveaway
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I'm really pleased to be able to offer this book as a prize to my readers. I think it's an invaluable source of inspiration for your collection, set out in a really accessible way for beginners and professionals alike. Unfortunately, I can only offer the prize to those based in the UK, but I promise I'll be doing more international giveaways in the future so stay tuned!
To enter, submit your entries via the widget below. It will require you to sign in and then check off each step that you take to enter (e.g. if you tweet something, you need to indicate that you've done it in the widget — it's not automatically detected).
A pretty little giveaway: wattle you win?
I'm often 'giving away' a lot of calligraphy and lettering information here on the blog, but have never given away a prize. Today, it begins. Giveaways giveaways giveaways! A wattle giveaway, to be precise. How exciting! At this year's South London Lettering Association's exhibition — themed 'celebrations and festivities' — I'll be exhibiting a celebration of my Australian heritage with two floral prints. Featuring Callistemon Citrinus (Bottle Brush) and Acacia Pycnantha (Golden Wattle), these two A6 pieces combine watercolour illustration with brush lettering and calligraphy script.
I'm really excited to be exhibiting for the first time and wanted to share it with you, not just the description, but the real life, real deal original artwork.
Your golden ticket to the golden wattle
In this wattle giveaway, I'm offering the chance to win not one, but two!, original A6 hand lettered and illustrated print of Australia's national flower, the Golden Wattle.
All you need to do to win is fill out the widget below. The competition ends on 25 September 2016.
It's worth noting: as I try to be a calligrapher with a conscience, this artwork has been created on exceptionally high quality paper (300gsm cold pressed watercolour) that I have reused after trialling another artwork on the other side.
Good luck!
The serious bit — Ts and Cs
Let's keep it light, but real. Here is some information that you might want to know.
- This giveaway is for 2 x A6 original print featuring wattle illustration and hand lettering, as pictured or similar
- Anyone is eligible to enter. The prize will be sent wherever you are in the world
- We us Rafflecopter to run the competition, and this service allows us to randomly pick a winner once the competition has ended. The winner will be announced on the blog post, and contacted directly afterwards.
- By entering the competition, you'll be added to our mailing list (monthly updates and news about giveaways, new prints and limited editions). You can unsubscribe from the mailing list at any time.
Kate x