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How to Master the Art of Calligraphy

Ruling the Page for Capital Letter Calligraphy

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  • Joanne Wasserman

    Artist/Owner, Wasserman Design

    http://www.wassermandesign.com  
    301-589-3444

    Joanne Wasserman has been professionally engaged in original art, custom art services, and graphic design since 1979, when she opened Wasserman Design in Washington, DC, as a studio business. Joanne was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic DesignCalligraphy, drawing, painting, and graphic design are bedrock art realms that Wasserman uses interchangeably to explore diverse subjects material and create original formations of content and imagery. Her intention for every work of art is the same: to communicate what is most intensely meaningful about the circumstances which shape a subject's identity.Over the years, Wasserman has produced a singular body of works for business clients and individuals whose interests are focused on serious issues of life in today's world. Her testimonial art honors statesmen and leaders for their career achievements and dedication to public service. Recently, two exemplary works of calligraphy and illumination were composed for Senator John Warner, of Virginia, and Former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Atlantic Council of the United States commissioned both of these works of art. Wasserman's mural painting for the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing is a visual tribute to the school's educational mission across the entire field of nursing practice; the mural was named after an alumnus: The Leona Bowman Carpenter Center for Community Health Nursing.Other works include several drawings and watercolors that were made to express the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's advocacy on behalf of all countries in which landmines have been used against innocent civilians, causing the destruction of lives, homelands and national economies.Wasserman's interests in current events, American history, and the development of writing systems and art traditions of peoples throughout the world are frequent catalysts for her choice of topics; moreover, through her work she cares to express the endearing aspects of living that are all around us. Change Agents of Culture is an ongoing series of 27 works that address creativity and invention in American society from the late 19th through 20th centuries. The first seventeen of these calligraphy-paintings were exhibited at the Embassy of Japan's Information and Culture Center, in Washington, DC, where the artist gave a public talk about writing systems in the world, entitled, PictureWritingThen & Now.

  • Ruling the Page for Capital Letter Calligraphy

    Calligraphy is the art form of writing beautifully. The writing system of Western world history is presented through the Chancery Cursive Script, the 15th Century, formal, book hand, invented by Italian professional scribes. Viewers can increase their manual skills as well an artistic insights during the time in which they practice the writing of an 'italic alphabet' using a pen, hand-dipped in ink, on pages that are ruled, also, by hand.

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    Cursive

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  • Transcripts

    Joanne Wasserman: Hello! I am Joanne Wasserman and my studio is Wasserman Design and today we are learning Chancery Cursive script. We have finished all the small letters, we are already writing sentences with them, but the capital letters will allow us to write sentences in good English grammar form. So, the first thing to learn the capital letters is to rule our lines four of the capital letters. The only difference between the lines for the small letters and the capital letters is just one extra line. So, you will find this really familiar from what we did at the beginning of this lesson.

    First we take our pen because we are going to make the letters, the width of ours proportional to the width of our pen. So I have taped my paper down, I have my T-square and I am going to make the five marks for my small letters, as I did before by just making little blocks with my pen touching one edge to another. So that is five and so that is enough with the pen and then I will count from the top, one, two squares and two and a half and I will just make a little mark and then just as I did before I will take a scrap piece of paper and just mark down the top of that first of the five squares and the middle mark I just made for the two and a half distance and then at the end a five.

    Then I will move up and I moved up my paper and I now, I do not need that middle mark any more, I just need to hit the far, the bottom so this space is five pen and I am going to put a little X on my scrap paper to mark that space as five pen-width wide and then I am going to make one more mark and it also will be five pen-width wide. I do not need to mark that middle two and a half distance anymore, I did it once. So now I have instead of four marks, I have five, one, two, three, four, five. So, alright, from here we have already got the middle mark with a two and a half distance, I want to go down and start and I want to make my next mark where I have that X on my scrap paper, I am going to put the X right on the paper and then I am going to mark that last line and just leave it blank.

    Then I just move my whole scrap piece down to that first mark and now I am going to mark that two and a half distance. Then pick up five, then here where my X is I am going to mark that line and put an X to remind myself that that is where I am writing my small letters. Then make that next line and go down and keep going down the page marking. So I am done with the paper, I have got my mark and I will take my T-square and with my pencil, I would just rule this lines all the way down and they are all parallels to one another. With the T-square lining up against the edge of the table, it goes very quickly.

    There and we have now one, two, three, four, five, six lines in which we can write all the letters of the capital alphabet which are called Majuscule. It is a Latin term for the large letters.

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