Learn Calligraphy: The Complete Book of Lettering and Design Author: Margaret Shepherd | Language: English | ISBN:
1435295315 | Format: PDF
Learn Calligraphy: The Complete Book of Lettering and Design Description
In an age of myriad computer fonts and instant communication, your handwriting style is increasingly a very personal creation. In this book, Margaret Shepherd, America's premier calligrapher, shows you that calligraphy is not simply a craft you can learn, but an elegant art form that you can make your own.
Calligraphy remains perennially popular, often adorning wedding invitations, diplomas, and commercial signs. Whether it is Roman, Gothic, Celtic, Bookhand, or Italic style, calligraphy conveys class and elegance. Margaret Shepherd makes this ancient art form accessible in a completely hand-lettered technical guide that will:
* Provide context for calligraphy as an art, exploring the rich tradition of hand-lettering and mapping the evolution of the most popular styles.
* Give detailed technical advice on choosing pens, paper, and inks, setting up your workspace, mastering various pen angles, along with step-by-step illustrations to guide you as you practice.
* Explain which alphabets are appropriate for different forms of writing. For example, the Roman alphabet works well for short, unpunctuated passages, while the Italic alphabet is more suited to informal everyday communication.
* Encourage you to personalize your lettering by using variant strokes and interpreting how you would like the words to look on the page.
* Inspire you with carefully chosen illustrations and examples, which bring letters to life.
In Margaret Shepherd's own words, "Calligraphy trains not only your eye and hand, but your mind as well." Learn Calligraphy is the authoritative primer for this age-old craft, and will help develop a new appreciation for lettering as you discover your creative personality.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
- Library Binding: 167 pages
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1435295315
- ISBN-13: 978-1435295315
- Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 8.5 x 11 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I am learning calligraphy and have looked at a number of books on the subject. This book is almost perfect. She gives you so much more than alphabets: key exercises to do before you start the alphabets, typical beginner's problems (most of which I have experienced!), practice pages you can reproduce. Her sections on swashes and "accessorizing" Gothic capitals are also wonderful - what had always seemed highly mysterious to me turns out to be a matter of combining building blocks, creativity, and - who would have thought - a lot of fun.
One thing she does not do is to cover every hand imaginable. There are lots of books like that out there. Rather, she only covers a small number of hands, but covers them very thoroughly, with a special eye to us novices. For example, once I got the basic hands down, I found one of my main problems was spacing the letters. Nothing looks worse than inconsistent horizontal spacing. She gives good coverage to this important issue, for example suggesting that you step back and look at it from a distance. Try it - if you're a novice, you'll be surprised at how different (and maybe bad) it looks.
I also very much enjoy the samples of projects that she shows as examples of how to apply each hand. In this she highlights the talents of (I assume) her friends, and it adds to the book. Looking at alphabet after alphabet as is done in typical calligraphy books, you don't get a good feel for how you'd use each one, and variations you can apply. Her other book "Calligraphy Projects for Pleasure and Profit" (which I also have) gives you lots more along these lines, but the ones in this book are different and I find them just as valuable.
I even like the way she letters the whole book in her (what she admits is slightly idiosyncratic) italic hand.
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