Feathers of Hope

The Grain Of Letters

One of the exciting things in our workshop this weekend was playing with the textural quality of letterforms. Nibs made out of sheets of balsa wood make very interesting and organic marks on paper. And as we discovered, the most unusual things can make for writing implements. In the last series of exercises we did, we experimented with a square of Stim-u-dent toothpicks! They made marks like a music ruling pen, only more so. The textural quality of letters for the most part gets lost using digital type, which is of course most of the letters we encounter these days.

The alphabet at right is one where I was struck by the very reed-like quality of the letterforms of the E and the F, and tried to build upon that for the rest of the letters.