Summit at Colorado Springs

The International Calligraphy Conference - Summit, took place in Colorado Springs last week.  It was a wonderful week of learning and camaraderie.  What a beautiful venue at Colorado College.
I took the 5 1/2 day workshop with the famous Calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander brodyneuenschwander.com.  I had heard so much about him, especially the part about everyone crying in his class.  I wasn't sure if it was his teaching style or if he was a task master and strict.  I thought he was wonderful.  He seemed to be genuinely interested in what you had to say and had such wonderful creative ideas to express what each of us wanted in the beginnings of our 'book'.  Not only did we have to delve into some of our emotions, that were sometimes suppressed and revealed through our tears, but we had to find a way to use our artistic abilities to convey those feelings.  It was a tremendous amount of work and no one finished, but now have an idea to continue to complete the stories.  Here are a few photos from the week.

Sunset towards Pikes Peak, walking to our apartment.

Brody showing how to abuse quill pens.

A lesson prompt for one of our pages.

Class photo of lucky students with Brody.

Front or first page,  I realize that I did not illustrate it correctly..but will work on it.  Right, 3 different scripts for each part of our stories.

following pages....I began a stitching with different color threads and sewn through X for Xesco and Y for Yuki...

Opposite side of embroidered and cut out frames page to reflect the view of the first pages..

The pages seem to come together serendipitously... this from being blind and having a partner to guide the placement of a tool but not the movement of it and tie into it our word prompt.

The right side of this layout was a prompt from Brody to slowly change two of our chosen words from out text.  The left side was my attempt to camouflage a badly written script to illustrate part of my story.

Part of my written text on the left and a word picked from my text on the right...I started with dirty sumi water and slowly made each letter lighter in color for the word 'nowhere'.

The left page, before,was an unsuccessful attempt at writing 'last dance' with watered sumi ink to show tears..but the letters all blended together.  It was Brody's suggestion to cut out stylized letters.  The right page was done with two different prompts by Brody .. seemingly not related to one another.

This photo is of two pages, one with the free script at the top (another prompt from Brody) and a cutout window at the bottom, and the other, a view of a painting of the bird.  Hidden is the written script of the explanation of this view on the same page as the full painting.

Here is the photo of the table of examples from our class at Show and Share...Everyone did exceptional work and I think very content at their attempts.

My invented letter form to show nervousness and fright.

Inspiration from Yukimi Annaud

For five days, 20 participants of Friends of Calligraphy and I learned and were inspired from well know artist and calligrapher, Yukimi Annaud.  We worked very hard and made lots of texts and textures.  I think I went through over 80 pieces of paper. I look forward to doing it again.

Here are a few of my attempts:

practice piece with pencil, black fluid acrylic and white fluid acrylic...

Making our own letters with a parallel pen..fun attempt.

 

 

An practice piece made with my letters..(red indicates where I would put my chop, if I had one)

Monoline letters to make a texture..just a beginning

From our photos we brought in of things we saw that were interesting textures, my sidewalk photo inspired this folded pen text writing....yes, there is text......puffs of ochre were plants within the cracks of the sidewalk....After I finished did I see the profile of a woman....

With inspiration from a photo of plants, I produced this text with brush and sumi ink. Yes, there is text.

With squares cut from rejected pieces, I glued a book binding string, given to me by Lily Stevenson, between it and other rejected squares, to make this small hanging, each square is 2" x 2".

From a practice sheet of sumi ink and FW acrylic ink with brush, resulted in this triptych.

Also from a practice sheet of brushed gesso, I made this collage piece....The sprinkles of red squares were suggested by Yukimi..I had already put down the thin line of red and knew it needed something else...She solved it!

Yukimi suggested we make a book of all our work and had us make black covers with whatever we wished on the front.  It was held together with clips she provided.  This is mine with marks made with balsa stick and white liquid acrylic.