Gelly Roll and Wash

Pen and wash is a favorite medium of mine—it’s a great way to do landscape sketches quickly yet introduce a bit of color with some watercolor washes. And watercolor field kits that contain a set of small pans of paint are readily available and work well on outdoor sketching expeditions. One issue though is the choice of pen. Dip-nib pens are great in the studio but porting around bottles of ink is a risky thing to do in a backpack. Fountain pens are somewhat more portable, but generally too precious for the field, and fountain pen inks aren’t waterproof, a desirable quality if one is going to paint washes over the ink drawing. I have often used Sakura Micron Pigma pens, which are pigment-based archival-quality felt-tip pens, but these have a harsh feel to them.

Anyway, I can’t believe it has taken me so very long to discover Gelly Roll pens, also made by Sakura. They are roller-ball gel pens, and it turns out they are both archival and waterproof. Moreover, they are cheap and are available almost everywhere. Above is my first Gelly Roll and wash landscape, looking west towards the Putah Creek gap in the Vaca Mountains.

Digital Calligraphy

Yesterday I bought a copy of Digital Calligraphy by George Thomson. It seems very counterintuitive to move away from paper and ink, though he does have a whole section on scanning work that has been made in the traditional way.

I recently got a digitizing tablet at work and have been trying out different brushes in Illustrator and Photoshop. More practice is definitely needed but so far it’s much better than trying to do this with a mouse! Mostly it needs editing, but it’s easy enough to edit.

Fontographer seems to have been the industry standard for turning scanned lettering into type, but according to a post on Typographica, Macromedia is letting it fade away. There do seem to be a couple of alternatives, though, including TypeTool, which I’m eager to try.

There seems to be far more arabic calligraphy available in a digital format than western calligraphy. When I see Shahram Shimi’s gorgeous digital calligraphic landscapes, for instance, I wonder when western calligraphers are going to catch up, but also what has propelled so many calligraphers of arabic in that direction.