BREAKING THE RULES
A letter from Acorn Studio
Dear Reader,
Welcome to my first-ever blog post! Firstly apologies for the gap between then and now - some life happened in between. Thank you for all your kind comments on my Facebook posts. In response to some of your enquiries, this blog is about breaking the rules.
Firstly, I am definitely not a calligrapher but I have studied typography and lettering so I did begin with knowing the theory which has helped me enormously. I should also fess up that my father David Harris is a lettering artist and if you’ve studied calligraphy it may well be one of his books you’ve been using, so this gave me a head start.
That said, like sketching, I can put a lot of pressure on myself to ‘do it properly’ which prevented me from doing any lettering for decades. The work I’m doing now is my antidote to that and my letters are deliberately wonky, misshapen and splodgy. I just want to enjoy the process and not worry about getting it ‘right’. So, basically, I follow only one rule…
The Art of Calligraphy - David Harris
The bit I make sure I get right (or try to at least) is getting the thicks and thins of the letters in the right place. Basically, if I get this right I can get everything else wrong.
The alphabet we use today was developed from the Roman. The capitals created using a brush and the lowercase a pen which determines where the thicks and thins of a stroke occur. The angle of the brush or pen determines how thick or thin the letters are.
As reference any professional typeface will have the thicks and thins in the right place - Times New Roman, Garamond, Baskerville for example. Following this simple rule keeps letters looking professional no matter how crazy they get. I should however issue a warning here. Once you’ve started to take note of where the thicks and thins are it’ll drive you some kind of crazy seeing all the places it has gone wrong!
I hope you found this brief blog useful. In my next blog I’ll go over materials. If you’d like me to go into more detail about anything or have any other topics to suggest please feel free to drop me a line at rebeccaxharris@cloud.com
Happy sketching and thank you for reading!
Love Rebecca x