SMEARS HAPPEN

Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Italian American Heritage Month. Country Music Month. Every day in October appears to have a celebration of one thing or another. For me, October is Inktober, a worldwide challenge to artists to do one ink drawing a day.

This year I've decided to practice hand lettering. I've chosen to do a name a day so that I can practice what is called Modern Calligraphy, which is a more casual form of old fonts. The casualness of the various alphabets lets me stray above or below the pencil foundation line. I can stretch out the letters or condense them. I still need to know basic calligraphy to make my letters sing.

The pencil drawing before I apply ink

I first draw a bottom line on the page, which gives me a visual starting point. As a hand letterer, not a calligrapher, I then pencil in the letters, adjust the spacing where necessary. Once the underdrawing is complete, I usually use a light box with another piece of paper on top of my pencil drawing and  use better paper to outline the letters with ink and fill in the weighted parts of the letters. Better paper avoids the feathers that appear on the edges of letters when I am using practice sheets. Because this is practice, I'm doing everything on one piece of paper.

Oh, smears! Even small ones need to be fixed.

I walk out of the room, do other things and come back to erase the pencil lines, which still show beneath the inked areas. As I touch the kneaded eraser to the paper, I smear some of the letters. I remember my dad in his studio when he was having a bad day. We could hear the swear words ripping out of the studio door in our backyard and knew that after many hours of work, he had probably smeared something or dropped a spot of ink on the page. He could use white-out or scrap off the ink with an Exacto knife, but sometimes he had to start over.

Self-portrait by Ralph C. Heimdahl

And that is what I had to do today. Start over. Smears happen.

The corrected version of the names that smeared. I also corrected the awkward "o" in Carolyn. This is why artwork takes so long to complete. Three versions so far.