Hey,
@Lucie Y - A bit of encouragement and advice for your particular goals.
* And I want to preface these remarks by saying that everyone should do what makes them happy and feel good, but getting better at stuff usually involves a little unhappiness.
* Lucie, your work is already highly accomplished, and you seem to want to level up. So as a professional and as a teacher - this is my take on how make the most of Inktober.
Inktober is a great time to make things that you don't intend to sell or give away.
Inktober is a celebration of mediocrity and mishap! Let it be "mid" (as my teens say - one of whom has successfully struck off on his own now,
@Erica McPhee - it'll happen for you too, eventually!)
A little pedantry & pedagogy ahead:
I promise that making less successful or even outright unsuccessful pieces is never a waste. You'll always learn something from the process. I make a living as a professional scholar, artist and calligrapher, and less than 20% of the ink or paint I put to paper ever gets to prime time. I write 10 pages of prose to come up with 2 good ones. I fill my notebooks with sketches and practice runs of different types of decorated capitals. Before I start a final presentation piece, I draft full-text tests of the script to determine size and layout; and then I do complete, full-scale layouts of commissions (sometimes two or three versions). I make monochrome ink sketches and elaborate under-drawings before doing full-sized watercolor paintings.
Medieval scribes called this type of work "foul papers" or "foul copy" - and they threw most of it away, but we know about it, because they talked a lot about what it took to prepare a "fair copy" or a "presentation copy" of a manuscript. So -- as a calligraphers, you know, let's not think that we're better than Matthew Paris or Adam Pinkhurst or Jeanne de Montbaston, and can go straight to "fair copy" without the foul.
If you give yourself over to the raw task of putting a lot of ink on paper, you'll really grow. Last Inktober, we had a discussion of getting out of our comfort zones (Thank you,
@AnasaziWrites and
@Zivio ). I'm always telling my students that if they're not failing from time to time, they're not trying hard enough. One of my art teachers impressed it upon me that you never get to paint a masterpiece unless you've also painted rooms and rooms full of less than masterful work (it's how you might eventually achieve that mastery).
I'm going to suggest that if you sketch out a versal every day without worrying about being able to "use" it for something - and then pair it with a text (ronde or copperplate or italic or whatever), you'll see the following happen:
1. You'll get bored with your (very beautiful and very accomplished) vine and flower designs, and you'll experiment with other types of decoration. Some of them will look bad. That's okay! Some of them will surprise you with their beauty and with their potential - and they'll give you something to follow up with later.
* Remember that "ideas" sheet I posted to your thread about them? I drew those with a gel pen and colored pencils - they don't have to be precious; it's enough to give an idea. You don't have to give every one of the the full treatment!
* And therefore you'll end up with a larger repertoire of designs to draw from for your "presentation" pieces later.
2. You'll experiment with the relationship between the versal and the text - spacing, sizing, style, etc. Again - some will look better than others. Think about what makes some look better than others - you'll start to develop a theory about it.
3. You'll develop an instinct (or at least a written record) for what's going to work with regard to style/design/script. Which will make future projects faster, easier, and more polished. In other words, you'll get from "foul" to "fair" quicker, and the "fair" will be fairer.
/pedagogy.
*******
My particular goals this Inktober: exploring my ink collection for art purposes; practicing my copperplate. Usually when I paint a commission, I use watercolors because they are stable and predictable pigment-based media. Dye-based fountain pen inks can be wild-cards. They often have astounding properties: chromatography, duo-tones, sheen, shimmer, and chemical reactivity to bleach and to other inks. You never know what's going to happen when you mix them with each other - sometimes they actually repel each other; sometimes they just seize up into a gel. But they also have different layering and lifting properties, so I'll be testing those too. I expect some ink drawings will not go well! But at the end of the month, I'm going to know a lot more about how I can use particular inks and combinations of inks for art purposes as well as calligraphy. And knowing which ones don't work is also important!
And you know - I hardly ever do presentation work with copperplate. But if it were better, I'd have another option.
--yours truly, K
PS: Remember this "fail" from last Inkvent? - the ink is "Ruby Blues"; the drawing is of Ruby Bridges. It is not what I was hoping for, I still think it looks terrible, but I now know lots of things about what this ink will and won't do, which is very valuable. I eventually got over the shame, so I'm showing it here again as an object lesson in getting over myself.
