Christmas Message, 2009

This was the message inside my Christmas card this year.  Written with a Kuretake Calligraphy marker, and reduced.  The ascender of the final d in ahead, as originally written, sloped too far to the right.  This was rectified in Photoshop — first, I selected that portion of the letter, then used Transform/Skew to bring it in line with the slope of the rest of the message.  Finally, I cleaned up the d by cloning and erasing parts of the letter.

Ballpoint Scribble (2009)

Some ballpoint scribble on a McDonald’s receipt — I find it useful to squeeze in a bit of practice whenever I can, on whatever paper I can lay my hands on!

The Universal Penman, 1741

One of my favourite calligraphic styles is the 18th-century English Round Hand, known more commonly these days as ‘Copperplate’.  It is notoriously difficult to write well, but I try to stay faithful to the original by studying the splendid resource, The Universal Penman (1741), a collection of engravings by George Bickham of the works of the best penmen of his day, including his own.  This extract is from Plate 90, written by Willington Clark and engraved by Bickham.

Poster for a Talk (2007)

The beautiful poster you see above, for a talk on the use of humour in teaching, was put together by Fiona Jeremiah, a teacher with a gift for design.  My contribution (below) was the title and subtitle, which I wrote in black, using a calligraphy marker.

Fund-Raiser Poster (2006)

On the left is a poster-sized mocktail menu for a fund-raising event organized by a student group (of which I was staff adviser).  As my students knew I practised calligraphy, they asked if I would supply the handwriting for the menu — I was, of course, delighted to, and so wrote out all the menu items using a black calligraphy marker.  On the right is one such sheet of writing, which the group leader, Adrian Tan, scanned, cropped and rearranged to form the poster on the left. 

Who says students don’t give their tutors homework? :-)