„Pimp up your Italic“, Session I; Festival of Calligraphy, England
August 14th - 16th, 2022

CLAS – Calligraphy & Lettering Arts Society / 28th Festival of Calligraphy, Scarman Centre, Warwick, University

August, 14th – 20th 2022

Session 1 – Pimp up your Italic

We all know and love the italic alphabet. Some of us started their calligraphic adventure with the italic letters. It´s time now to add some speed, go and get into a contemporary use of these letterforms. We will put our broad-edged nibs aside and work with the automatic pen. Let´s experiment with more body movement, dynamic gestures and enjoy textures. Let´s try out rougher surfaces and play with colors. Let´s pimp up our italic!

More information: We will warm-up with traditional italic. Let´s find out where everybody stands, let´s discuss questions on tools, letterforms, solve problems with ink, paint and paper. Now feeling comfortable with our sweet italic  we will add speed and might go on a rougher paper.

Slowly leaving our beloved comfort-zone, where we will discover a much more expressive italic alphabet. Through all our exercises, we will constantly use our favourite gouache colours, might mix a colour range to make our exercises more exciting and also with an eye on the mere ornamental beauty of those.

Even more excitement will come from going to automatic pen. Movement of the hand, the arm, the shoulder will be on focus. We get into a dynamic rythm of writing, create ornamental letter carpets, but also go to text and layout, we might combine the different styles of italic for a final pieces or a series of pieces.

Material list: Broad-edged nibs (Brause, Speedball, Mitchell), nib-holder, Automatic Pens (No. 3,4,5 are perfect for this),  brush to fill the nibs & mix gouache, palette for mixing gouache (your favorite colours, zinc white and your favourite black), pencil (H), water container, tissue, scissors, ink, gouache, Sennelier shellack ink (your favourite colour), sketch-pad DIN A3 (ca. 120g), some sheets of better quality paper (e.g. BFK Rives, 1 or 2 sheets of water colour paper with a rougher surface), text / thoughts / words