Nov. 30, 2009 Advanced Class assignments

At Westchester we are continuing to create pieces that have a prescribed; theme, color theme, paper, letterform and text. The students have chosen a week to make the rules for that day. For the 7 weeks we will have these items listed and we will complete the assignment each week for a critique the following week. "If it weren't for deadlines, I wouldn't have anything finished" is a common mantra, so we are making it so you will actually finish the project. Today's assignment is: Nov. 17, 24, Dec. 1, 8, 2009, Jan.12, 19, 26, 2010
7 weeks Calligraphy Classes, DeAnn Singh Teacher
1. Format will all be 8 1/2”x11” or 11x17”
2. You can use roman capitals in any piece, along with the specified letterform.
November 17. DeAnn Singh
Theme: Alphabets, The Written Language
Color theme: Brown, black, yellow,
Letterform: Italic
Paper: Arches Text Wove
Text: From Ancestral Voices, Decoding Ancient Languages by James Norman
pg.5 Chapter 1 The Invention of Writing
Man has resided on earth for more than a million years, yet we know very little about how he lived or what he thought during most of this time. In some of these societies the spoken tongue must have become quite expressive, capable of conveying a wide range of man’s thoughts and intellectual achievements. But because sounds fade quickly, and words, though stored in the memory, are not safe from distortion, hundreds of these languages disappeared without leaving any trace behind. We have no idea what they were like because the speakers had no way of recording them for future generations. It is as if the people and their languages had never existed.
November 24. Helen Chu
Theme: Calligraphy is order
Color Theme: Metallic Watercolors or gouache
Letterform: Italic and variations
Paper: Black Arches Cover
Text:
ORDER is a lovely thing;
On disarray it lays its wing,
Teaching simplicity to sing.
It has a meek and lowly grace
Anna Hempstead Branch
December 1 Gayle Hatton
Theme: Letters
Color Theme: Black, white and favorite color
Letterform: Stacked alphabet
Paper: fabric- I will bring fabric for book cover
Text: Actions, looks, words, steps form the alphabet by which you may spell character. Johann Kasper Lavater
December 8 Francine Oller
Theme: The beginning
Color Theme: White, black, & one other BOLD color of choice.
Letterform:
Paper:
Text: A - The first letter in the majority of world alphabets. A letter of great mystic power and “magic virtue” with those who have adopted it, and with whom it’s numerical value is one.
January 12 Marjorie Grace-Sayers
Theme:
Color Theme:
Letterform:
Paper:
Text:
January 19 Geri Bieber
Theme: Development of Writing
Color Theme:
Letterform: Uncial
Paper: Arches text wove
Text: From: History and Technique of Lettering By Alexander Nesbitt
Writing grew out of pictures… The greatest stop, probably, in the history of writing, was the development of phonetic writing-the representation of sound… Our own alphabet begins with the Greeks when it changed the direction of writing to left to right.
January 26
Binding pages into a book.