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Indeed, the last big hoorah of the hurricane season has brought a lot of rain to the RTP region of North Carolina. We need the rain without the pain. The rain is accompanied by leaves ready to make their exit.
Leaves are wrongly named. They don't. They grow and flutter, do their photochemical duty and then they fall. They congregate. They must be evacuated, shooed and sent away - or mulched. Left to their own they would be left to their own.
The rain is a lot more welcome than the H1N1 or any other seasonal crud.
Despite even the fact that wet roads make people slow down and punish the ones that don't it helps create auto accidents and pain and aggravation.
The plus of the weather is that for the arena of creatives, excuses to put off projects reflect off the closed windows.
In previous weeks it may have been too pretty to write, gild or illustrate. This wet weather has removed that line of faulty thinking.
Distractions aside, the increased humidity makes some art applications easier to do.
Watercolor, gouache and gilding gesso remain more workable for a bit longer.
Papers are a bit more malleable and are more responsive to the bone folder and embossing tools.
Raymond Foss caught some of the feeling of this in this poem:
Alone in the Rain
I am alone on my porch, in the rain.
Nightfall is closing in.
Now, the island is lonely.
The world is muffled.
The rain falls on the porch roof.
Two mourning doves twitter as
They go from tree to tree,
Branch to branch.
Now they coo and call
To their mate.
The water shimmers
As sheets of rain
Disturb its surface.
A small yellow warbler alights
On a branch before me,
Ready to add its cheerful song to the mix.
Rain now falls from the roof
The staccato of the heavy
Drops on the hard ground below.
A lone boat courses across the water,
Eager for home.
It leaves but a wake, lost on the rocks.
Mist obscures the shoreline.
Loons steer by me.
I am still, writing these lines.
But I am anxious.
How I long for the sun
For the warmth to join me again
In my rustic cabin in the lake.
Written 6/18/2000 - same day as Dew in the Morning and Ten Feet Overhead
HE knew what to do with a rainy day. tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com
There are just a few of us who write on goats.
Whether the movie currently out, "Men Who Stare At Goats", is a success or not, makes no never mind. George Clooney can bust a blood vessel just thinking about making a goat pass out - but he won't approach the anxiety and joy of beginning a writing project on a nice piece of parchment or vellum.
The skins are two different animals. Parchment comes from goats and vellum is calfskin.
Many centuries ago, other writing materials existed, but were unavailable.
Papyrus was invented in Egypt, but was prohibited from export or even ownership by non-Egyptian holy folk. That cartel was busted up with the demise of the Egyptian empire, but writing on papyrus remains a challenge (fun) to this day. Papyrus is thinly split slices of the papyrus reed interlaced at perpendicular angles and sanded smooth (sort-of). We can do our own pumicing and sandaracing and then be very careful with our lettering. The problem comes when we try to use a too sharp broad-edge writing tool with too much pressure. I love writing on papyrus - there is something about working with such an ancient material - just like I did when playing with little Moses before his Momma made the little boat out of the papyrus and pitch and you know the rest of the story.
In Pergamos (from which the word parchment is derived), a city in Asia Minor, the art of splitting and curing goat hides as a writing material was truly clever. Cured hides could be bound into scrolls and they have lasted through the centuries.
Vellum, made from calfskin (veal-skin), is another science, makes a less oily writing material. It is the favorite of most serious scribes.
As you can imagine, the skin of an animal is not cheap and this is before the art is applied.
NOTE: at this point please do not confuse vegetable parchment or vegetable vellum or vellum surfaced papers with the real thing.
When a skin arrives, it is not ready for writing. It needs to be flattened, pumiced (true volcanic ash) and thoroughly smoothed.
If there is a STARING at the goat or calfskin, this is the time. The art or commission will find its place and the general outline will be made. Then the work begins.
I use only 7-9H pencils or my hard silverpoint pen or a steel stylus to make marks on the precious skins. I do not want carbon residue on my skins.
The lettering is applied and the the versals and then the illustration and finally, the gilding.
I stare at the goat or calf at every level of work. The goat or calf stares back.
We are in this together. The animal gave themselves and I have put myself into the project. The finished goatskin or calfskin will be around a lot longer than me.
The goat who stares at Tim.
The goat wins. © tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com
Videos complete! Completed videos are now posted on my website and You Tube. Thanks for the encouragement!
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I've added a couple of new videos to these sites for your viewing pleasure and information about making broad-edge pen letters.
The latest has to do with capital letters.
Capital letters - used only 2% of the time in normal writing - ought to be done well. (If you are a teacher or parent or just interested in checking this out, PLEASE get a straight-edge, a few pages of non-illustrated, non-technical text and start counting. LC vs. CAPS You choose caps. Let your students choose the lc. Count, total and do the percentages. Good for reading, good for math. Good for YOU.)
Just IN CASE you were wondering, we hardly use the terms upper and lower case in the scribal world. Until movable type came along, there were no such terms regarding letters. The names came along because the lc letters were used 98% of the time and type was set on the floor in huge type holders - less to lug. 2% of the time the typesetters could grab the caps and set them. Less to lug. In that day, leading, kerning and eventually casting was done by hand.
Any of you who has ever endured watching me type must realize that I learned typing on a Linotype machine - not a typewriter. Google THAT and love ME and my fingers and know why the keys sometimes hop around when I get excited timtyping.
Technically these letters are majuscules (major letters). They are monumental, since they are carved on monuments and they are versals, since they began verses. Most of them existed in a form familiar to us since 2 BC, when I was a feral child in the mountains of Virginia.
8 years of Latin studies will not be repeated here or in my classes. I use it only to torture people hanging from chains who keep muttering something about the death of handwriting.
In most cases italic capitals are 2 pen widths or so shorter than the ascenders in the body of writing in which they are used. Their pen angle is flatter. 35-40 degrees instead of 45 - 30-35 if you are using a 35-40 degree italic hand.
The angle has to be less to make the verticals more stout.
Flourishes are nice - but control them. It is wisely said that under every flourished letter is a simple, strong letter trying to stay in. (You know, the old too much make-up and overblown yah-dah, and so on.)
The capital letter exemplars I have created do not pretend to be perfect. They do come with my high-tech angleometer attached to the back of the Sakura marker. It reveals how and when I change pen angles while making the letters, crosses and flourishes.
I have also made punctuation marks even included the little-used interrobang.
No one will watch the whole thing at a sitting. You might look at a particular letter or two.
I was writing out of my writing window and comfort zone. If I had been writing where I could have seen my marker point, all you could have seen was my very thin hair and the finished work.
There are some other new videos and others are coming.
I plan to cover the 4 major hands: Uncial, Blackletter, Foundation. I will add the final italic numbers and a few missing miniscule letters.
Classes through Wake Tech begin in January and are being moved to Reedy Creek Middle School, near Harrison and I-40 in Cary. I hope to see you there. © tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com
