Calligraphy Flourish Friday - Decorated Letters

The second of two workshops I took with Peter Thornton was called, "Written, Drawn and Decorated Letters of Adolf Bernd." Peter brought along samples of Adolf Bernd's letters, and he discussed his fascination with Bernd and his work. See an example of Bernd's work HERE.  (FYI, the book is out of print.)  Jo Miller had taken this workshop from Peter and blogged about it. (See HERE and HERE)  The workshop sounded great, and I was happy to get the opportunity to take the workshop here in Indy.

I'm not going into detail about the entire workshop, but one thing Peter taught us was taking a plain, basic versal and transforming into a more contemporary, decorated letter.  At home, I tried to remember those steps to create the letter R.

A close-up of my progression.

Once I had a form I liked, I used a .03 ZIG Millennium (Peter' preferred pen for this) and went over the  pencil lines. 

Then more strokes were added with a .01 pen to break up the larger areas. Then watercolor was brushed into the different shapes.

A nice tip that I learned from my calligraphy mentor, Ellen Simon, is this:  take a GellyRoll glitter pen and scribble a spot onto a scrap piece of paper. Then take a damp brush and pick up some of the sparkly color.

Paint over your existing watercolor for a nice, subtle sparkle.  Maybe you already knew this, but I didn't.  I really like it. It's not over-the-top GLitTeR!!, but just a nice touch.

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Go forth and flourish!