April Splash

Materials: All materials purchased with no sponsorship or expectation of reward. Tesco flowers and Butterflies notepad bought by me; ink and pens all purchased by me from various sources; 
Manuscript pen used in my own journal from Powells of Galway and Notebook purchased in T K Maxx.

I'm not going to pretend this is perfect calligraphy, I'm quite rusty at lettering but this is more about spacing and setting out a page than the lettering itself.  I did calligraphy as part of Art to my Leaving Certificate. I was the only person who did calligraphy to the Leaving Cert that year.  You were given so many lines from a poem on your English course that year, mine was a section of The Fisherman by William Butler Yeats.


This is me playing with the poem "Song" or April.  I'm kinda cheating here as I've already lettered this a few times and already did it for my work blog so I know what the lettering is going to be like somewhat.  I like how it worked out there so I'm repeating it into my general diary.  You can see me play with various letters and spacing.

This is me working more properly with it.

First off, listing all the capitals and seeing where I want to go with them.  The first page was done yesterday but the idea for the A came to me last night and I like it, funnily it only really works when I write left-handed.  I am left-dominant but I learned how to do calligraphy with both hands, I have found that my own handwriting doesn't impinge on the regularity of the lettering when I write with my right.

Then I work out the longest line, somewhat of a tie between line 2, "Laugh thy girlish tears" and the later line "Laugh thy golden tears" depending on how you write your os.  However if you look at it you can see that it would be best if it was written near the edge of the page and the earlier line written afterwards and spaced in a little..I may make the first April a little bigger.  With truly formal calligraphy I'd now centre the longest line on the page and base the margins of the page on this spacing, but this is not formal calligraphy by any manner or means.

Next you need to work out if the poem will fit on the page you have, I'm pretty sure about this one, but what you want to check is that you bias the empty space towards the bottom of the page. You shouldn't have equal spacing above and below because the eye sees the lower space as less.  My art teacher always said 2/3 bottom and 1/3 top.  But a reasonable bias works In this case I have 12 lines of poem plus title and author, which I could put either end of the same line but I plan to leave a line of a gap.  My page is 23 lines long.  If I start line two at about line 5 things should be fairly well spaced. 

The Version from my work  notebook. The Second April, April is a bit messed up as I glossed over the lines and started letting the next line, I just used correction tape to cover it up but the standard fountain pen ink didn't write well on it.  Oops.  I can't remember which of my standard pens I was using, it's a medium width with enough flex to get a bit of variation.

The version in my own notebook, and I forgot things, but it's a good example of what can and will go wrong.  The lettering I'm happy with overall but it would have suited larger spacing, not the double spacing but probably space and a half.  I started writing, with the Manuscript calligraphy pen and the ink that came with it, I used another pen to put the poets name in.  It gives the visual balance I was looking for. I wouldn't have got the whole poem in at that spacing so after the first four lines I reverted to single spacing.  Looking at it if I was to do it again I would have gone for the double spacing for after the title and then possibly for the next line and then revert to single spacing.

Two different versions of the same poem, quite similar lettering, slightly different results.