Modernizing Blackletter (Reggie Ezell: 2.5 day)

Skill Level: Intermediate and Advanced

This is NOT Your Grandad’s Gothic! No stick and diamond. No picket fence. Instead, it is what you choose it to become. Simply copying and memorizing individual alphabets is limiting. Having the skills to generate forms that uniquely embody the spirit of a text is far more empowering. We will transform static, predictable, traditional forms into rhythms and textures that speak in a more contemporary visual vernacular. In a calculated process of tweaking variables of the forms, not just slant, pen angle, shape, etc. but how they are made: pressurizing, multiple stroking, building in “inconsistencies”, and more, students will modulate the medieval into the modern. Everyone will come away with a finished work incorporating two or more of the variations of their choosing.

Supply fee: $5

Supply List: Speedball C-0, C-1, C-2 nibs; double ended wooded pen holders; 2 large brass nibs: 1” & ½” (can be shared); mechanical pencil 2-H lead; sharpener; white vinyl eraser; 18”-24” ruler; Moon Palace black sumi ink; Winsor Newton gum Arabic; alizarin crimson gouache or watercolor; Dr. Martin’s Bleed Proof White (or other white); 2 mixing pans; 2 mixing brushes; dropper and water; good small pointed brush (#2 or smaller); Xacto with #11 blade; grid pad – 8 squares to the inch made for calligraphy; matte spray fixative (if driving); newspapers (if driving); paper towels; masking tape; Scotch Removable tape; red ballpoint pen; Saral transfer paper; tracing paper; ruling pen

About the instructor: Reggie Ezell is a teacher. Over the past three decades his year-long course “26 Seeds: a Year to Grow” has been among the most highly regarded and sought after in the US and Canada. For a decade before that he taught calligraphy at Loyola University and the Newberry Library of Chicago. For the last five years his new extended studies course, Primitive to Modern, has been an intense fusion of millennia-old materials and methods – calfskin vellum, gilding, quills, dry pigments, and designs (e.g. Codex Aureus) with computer and ink-jet generated backgrounds, modernized alphabets, and contemporary, innovative designs and techniques. The structure, geared to flexibility, generates finished works based on the student’s preference for structured examples or individual initiative and interest. These exciting works have been emailed out weekly since 2009 as “Pic of the Week”, all archived on reggieezell.com.