Thank you, thank you, thank you Rachel Hazel (aka thetravellingbookbinder) for your latest inspiration. It is just what I needed today. I had hit a slump and didn’t know what to do with myself, until I recalled Rachel’s blog post from a few days ago on making an alphabet sketchbook.
This is such an uncomplicated project that it almost seems too easy … and yet it is just the thing to jog you out of a malaise. The idea is to take your book and some ink and just start writing the same letter across the page. Rachel suggests using a stick and some ink, which I duly did. I used two products: Ecoline Liquid Watercolour by Royal Talens, in Deep Grey; and Noodlers Ink in Squeteague. The stick I picked up in our garden.
I am working into a Japanese accordion book which has just been waiting for such a project. I think that I bought it nearly 10 years ago.
The process of writing is quite absorbing. After a while it is hard to recognise the letter, the shape instead comes to the fore. It feels a bit like that thing you do when you repeat a common word over and over until it ceases to mean anything and dissolves into a jumble of sounds.
As you can see from my photos I didn’t stop at one page. At my current rate expect that this will probably end up as the book of ‘cursive a’.
I suggest that you take a look at the fantastic images on Rachel’s blog. She at least has managed to get past the letter ‘a’ and shares some very beautiful pages and a short flip through of her book as well.
leonieandrews 
“Lock down Art” indeed, this reads almost like one long cry for help!? lol! It’s interesting to see the variations in letter shapes and ink.
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I hadn’t thought of it that way.π It’s definitely one of those exercises in setting a boundary, that forces you to try out all sorts of things. One thing that did surprise me was the difference between pages written one at a time and where I wrote across two pages at a time. The first photo was written one page at a time and the second photo of pages was written across both pages at the same time.
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Great idea. I have been playing around with different lettering (not calligraphy per se) thanks to the recent Sketchbook revival virtual workshops. Thanks for another great idea for isolation art!
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this is awesome.
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Wow, I love this. It’s beautiful. I have an interest in handwriting and I think I might try this. Reminds me of knitting, visually, and how it is repetitive and meditative to do (I would think) and I know it is to look at.
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I certainly got completely lost in the process in doing this. Rachel does suggest that writing in a cursive rather than printing encourages the flow, both in writing and flow state. As I commented to Emma, the variations seem extensive. I prepared more pages yesterday with the leftover watery ink. I look forward to seeing how those pages will develop. I am also considering whether I should try Capital A on the reverse side – of the frisson of danger!
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When I decided to re-learn to write in cursive (I wrote some posts about it a while back)
https://claudiamcgilladvice.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/i-continue-to-practice-handwriting/
I did sheets and sheets of practice writing. Now I still practice but I write down TV dialogue or eavesdropping at the cafe or the like. I have notebooks of these. And I get a lot of Little Vines inspirations from them. I find myself getting lost in just shaping the letters.
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I think these posts were before I started following your blog. I have read them with great interest as my handwriting is stuck from when I decided as a teenager to make it ‘different’ from the cursive I was taught. It’s oddly upright and sort of rounded. I might have been better off letting it remain more like I was taught.
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I had always had scrawly messy handwriting and felt self-conscious about it, and I decided to make a change, as the posts say. Glad I did, I like my writing now, and I have discovered I enjoy doing it, trying to make it look nice, and even and so on. It is relaxing to handwrite, it is an activity in of itself, and it’s given me a new interest in lettering which I am beginning to play around with.
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Nice blog π§π»ββοΈ
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