Learning Calligraphy

My friend, Irene writes beautiful calligraphy and she inspired me to learn it as well. I'm on a waiting list for a calligraphy class at Castle In The Air in Berkeley - but I'm 5th down on the list, so I'm not likely to get in. So...I decided to try to learn it on my own.

Above was my first attempt at playing around with ink and nibs - not great. I went to Castle In The Air last weekend and picked up some basic supplies, but I didn't have a clue what to do. There are many styles of calligraphy, the one I was interested to learn is called Copperplate. I love the thin thick lines. I found a web site that sold a beginners Copperplate kit - http://www.johnnealbooks.com/.

It arrived this Wednesday...oh boy I couldn't wait to start learning. Letter by letter, I practiced.

Now, after reading the step-by-step instructions, I was getting the hang of it.

I was filling up page after page...then I advanced to combining two letters together!

Now on to words and upper case letters...

And I'm on a roll, this is so much fun and addicting...

Next lesson, numbers...

Well, I've come a long way from Day 1...but I know I have lots of practice to do. They suggest several hours a week.  I'm going to try and keep it up, it's so much fun! Who would have thought that with all this collecting of nibs to use for mixed media projects, that I would actually be using them for its original purpose and really appreciate them.