Apocalyptic Assignment

My calligraphy course in Roman Majuscules continues to throw challenges my way. The latest one is a rendition of Revelation 6:8, the one where the four horsemen of the apocalypse are named along with wild beasts of the earth (which apparently didn’t merit their own horses). Roman majuscules lend themselves to ponderous, serious things, and would be quite unsuitable for, say, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” unless you were trying to pull a Monty Python. (Which Terry Pratchett does, in fact: he has the horsemen scratching their heads over how to play bridge in a bar while Cohen the Barbarian comes along and makes off with their horses. I forget which novel.)

We were to write out this verse in a mixture of 7mm and 15 mm-high letters with the attribution at 3mm; we could choose a left, centered, right, or asymmetric alignment. In these days of desktop publishing programs this is very easy to do in type but when you do it with a pen, it involves a lot of scissors, lettering, re-lettering, and so on; I can’t swear I didn’t futz with the right alignment a little in Photoshop before turning it in.

I chose a right-aligned text, much harder than I suspected, and spent hours working out the inter-line spacing, where the words should be larger, and so on. In the end the lonely word “earth” at the bottom is a reminder that things look pretty bleak out there. But this class is a lot of fun and it’s certainly a lot of work…