How To Choose Calligraphy Styles

How to choose calligraphy styles. A better way to look at this would probably be how to choose calligraphic scripts or how to choose a calligraphic hand. You could also suggest using how to choose a historical hand.

The best way to choose a historical script is to go to the original source material. I have some books here on the art of calligraphy. These are my favourite books for actually looking at calligraphy from other calligraphers.

But what I'd like to look at first of all is historical scripts. These are books on illuminated manuscripts which can be purchased at most museums and libraries and places like Rural Academy. This is a guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 by Michelle Brown and it is an exceptional book for looking at the various forms that historical has written.

Calligraphy is essentially what we call beautiful writing, but it's beautiful writing from the past, so looking at the historical sources is your best way to start learning any kind of calligraphy. But also the best way to choose the script that appeals to you. Christopher DuHammel's A History of Illuminated Manuscripts is also an exceptional book.

This is the second edition. Mark Drogen's book on Medieval Calligraphy is a very, very good book. Quite fun.

I mean, it's got some very good instructions. And then you have something like this from the Royal Academy, Illuminating the Renaissance which was an exhibition they had so it's an exhibition catalogue and it shows quite a lot of scripts from the Renaissance period right across Europe. It also shows a lot of illuminations and decorations around calligraphy.

For directions on how to actually write, this book is one of the best. It goes through materials, tools, techniques, scripts. David's book is also equally exceptional, The Art of Calligraphy, because it has some really wonderful full colour illuminations as well as illustrations of scripts.

And I would always advise you, whenever you want to learn a different script, always go to the historical source material. It's great to have exemplars by professionals, by teachers, but it is always better to go back to the original source. And of course, The Piece of the Resistance is Vord Marie Vayo's book on calligraphy which is a tour of some wonderful work with lots of historical examples and a ton of information.

So, the script I've decided to look at today is anchal which is a script used in the Insular Period by the Irish. And it has a lead pipe of four so we'll just look at what that means. I'm just ruling a baseline to start working from.

I've already mixed up some Windsor Newton gouache which is a nice solid black and I'm going to use a manuscript pen company Posternit so it's quite a big chunky script to work with. The interesting thing about this script is that it's a bilinear script meaning it is between two lines. Other scripts like the Talic are quatrolinear, meaning they have a baseline, a waste line, an ascendor line, and a descendor line.

We don't have this with the anchal script. Early scripts tend to be bilinear, basically capital scripts. Ruling this means we mark off our four little nitwits from our line.

We have a fairly flat thin angle, and you really do want the page to be perpendicular, parallel with you, and the vertical line to be perpendicular with your center line. It's a fairly flat angle, meaning if you have a straight line here, a perpendicular line to your base line, instead of it being parallel with the base line, just a little bit flatter so the letters are very round. Now, notice I'm not pressing very hard.

These letters are actually very beautiful once you start looking at them in their foremost structure because they have quite a lot of things we call hang twists. That's an e and this is a t. And I will also do an early amphisand.

And that's one of the ways that you can choose a calligraphy script or a calligraphic hand. .