Pentupmanship

Rare as Halley's comet comes a job for calligraphy, like this one.

I forget the name of the client.

(pausing for effect)

Here's what I'll say about calligraphy: It's hard.

Fun (to try and make the nib dance across the riffles and pits of the paper, to draw life from the letterforms) but hard.

Flub one flourish, come up short on an elegant stem, and you have to start over, which I did, for several pages.

For elegance and dance, you need not even leave this town to find Brenda Walton, although she's more of a paper and crafts designer anymore.

I doubt this calligraphy project of mine reached its desired use, for signage for a real estate development. To that I owe the School of Hard Knocks, finding along the way whom to work for and whom to avoid.

This particular designer was one to avoid, but I didn't know it until mid-stream. It may merit a blog post someday.

It's possible to mimic the letterforms digitally, such as with Adobe™® Illustrator©™, which I've done on occasion. One can revise and slop and refine endlessly. But it deprives the delight of seeing letterforms rendered once in a great flourish — the feelings they evoke — and the fun of making them.