Completed The Art of Lettering

[Tsaba]

3rd Fall, 513AV Tsaba sat at her desk and frowned at the book in front of her. She was in the office where she normally worked, although she wasn't working. Not technically. Instead, she was tackling one of the books that was in the pile that she was supposed to copy. A book beyond her skill. She traced the name of the book, printed neatly on the spine. A Beginner's Guide to Calligraphy. She opened it and carefully traced her finger over the strokes of the letter 'A'. The problem wasn't the instructions; she could copy those out just fine. The problem was the diagrams. She hadn't learned calligraphy herself, although it was a skill she'd always meant to develop, so she had no hope of accurately reproducing the diagrams in the book. Not yet, anyway. Tsaba focused on the waterlogged text, and carefully began reading the instructions.

[Tsaba]

Before even beginning to talk about lettering was a short section on quill handling and maintenance. Tsaba skimmed it, expecting (and seeing) nothing that she didn't already know. Tool handling and maintenance was important for any form of writing, and she'd learned to care for her tools long ago. She wasn't experienced at cutting the slanted edge required on a calligraphy quill, but the library had them already, for scribes like her. They were meant to be used for library work, but she didn't expect anybody to notice or care that she was still there in her off hours. Tsaba traced out the first letter. Her end result was a letter in her own handwriting, that looked a little bit like she was trying to copy a calligraphic style. Well, that wasn't too bad. Nobody perfected a skill on their first try. She copied it again. slower. Then again. Her letters were lopsided; the slant was wrong. She carefully measured out the letter in the book with her fingers, then drew a guide box on her own parchment. Using those guidelines, she drew the first letter. Her lines were uneven. It was the quill, that was the problem; she wasn't used to the slanted tip. And she knew that that was the whole point of calligraphy, to use such a tool to create letters that were beautiful; but perhaps it would be faster if she tried to learn the letter shapes first? She could always unlearn bad habits later. Tsaba put aside the quill, and took up her brush.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba had barely touched brush to paper when she realised her mistake. A few practice letters confirmed it. One couldn't simply substitute a quill for a brush and expect to make the same letters and movements. Hadn't she had that exact problem when she'd started glyphing using a quill? The brush lacked the broad slant of the quill; the letters flowed wrong, they weren't sharp, they were a different sort of smooth. Perhaps... perhaps she was doing it backwards. It made sense to familiarise herself with the lettering and the writing implement separately, but... Tsaba picked up the calligraphy quill again, and dipped it in ink. Then, she slowly, steadily began to draw out a Focus glyph. It was hard. She'd been relying on the brush too much. But she'd had some experience at different forms of writing glyphs; from a normal quill to a brush, to experimenting with inks, to writing in sand with a stick. She was familiar with the need to vary one's strokes and angles with the writing implement. And a glypher should be flexible, should be able to write their art in any material, with any tool. She just needed to figure out how to make the glyph with a calligraphy quill, how it was different to a brush. Her first glyph looked like... well, like one of her first glyphs. She identified the problems, mentally reordered her strokes, and tried again. The quill was tricky in ways that the brush wasn't. It was much easier to keep a stable line, but harder to very the thickness. And if the quill was moved the wrong way, it dug into the page. She persevered. She could do it. She could write the script. Writing was what she did.

[Tsaba]

As she worked, Tsaba became more accustomed to the quill. She learned how to angle her strokes to avoid stabbing the page. She learned how to vary her grip to change the stroke width. She drew glyphs; clumsy, but recogniseable glyphs. And then she turned back to the book. Calligraphy was the opposite of glyphing, in a way. To draw glyphs was to take the divine and adapt it to one's own hand. To write calligraphy was to take a basic, crude script, and make it beautiful. She traced out the first letter, stroke by stroke. And then she did it again. The spacing was difficult. When she had been learning glyphs, the had developed a system of writing them that made them easy to write, with simple strokes forming a framework for the more complex ones. That hadn't been the original purpose but she suspected that it made them rather easier to write. She had very little sense of the spacing of characters in calligraphy, beyond her knowledge of writing in general -- and her own handwriting did so much damage to the form that it was easier to treat calligraphy as a form of drawing. Tsaba wasn't very good at drawing. She scoured faint spacing lines in the parchment, which helped, although she hated to rely on such a thing. She could do away with them when she improved. Quill in hand and goal in mind, Tsaba kept practising.

[Tsaba]

What was a letter, really? In normal writing, it was merely a tool to express a fragment of information. Aesthetics mattered only insofar as they helped clarity. Experience had told her that glyphing was the same, although in the beginning she'd assumed otherwise; that the shape of the glyph was important, although the glyph was of course merely a complex letter. She still always strived to make her glyphs as even and aesthetically pleasing as possible, because anything else felt like a desecration. It was strange that, as a scribe, she'd never felt the same about normal writing. But that was the philosophy behind calligraphy, so she was going to have to start thinking that way. Tsaba wasn't sure that she was going to like calligraphy. But it seemed a necessary skill, and learning it was probably good for her. After all, what better way to understand the connection of writing to the divine, than to participate in the striving of mortal beings to make it so?

[Taylani]

XP Award!

Tsaba:

XP Award:

• +2 Calligraphy
• +2 writing
• +1 drawing

Lore:

• Calligraphy: Perfecting the slant
• Calligraphy: Brushes are not interchangeable with Quills

Comments :

Feel free to PM me with any thoughts or concerns. Don’t forget to edit/delete the grade request..

TAYLANI