Student Work from Black Magic Workshop

The St. Louis Calligraphy Guild had me in to teach Black Magic over the weekend. The workshop is about using color on black paper for lettering. Everyone worked really hard, and there were lots of oohs and aahs as they saw how amazing these colors look on black paper. Here are some samples of what they created.

We started by mixing 12 shades of gouache and then testing samples on different kinds of black paper.  We used Fabriano Ingres, Bugra black and Arches cover black. 

Then we moved on to testing Pearl-ex pigments and Twinkling H2Os:

Here is one table covered with samples of lettering done by the class on the second day:

These two were done by a left-handed calligrapher using a parallel pen:

Workshop with Charles Pearce

Over the weekend the Memphis Calligraphy Guild hosted a workshop with Charles Pearce.  The topic was pen manipulation, and we worked with uppercase and lowercase Romans. 

As he demonstrated on butcher paper at the front, we were able to follow along with his beautiful handouts. These handouts are the best I have ever seen -- with extraordinary clarity, drawings and notes. Late in the day on Sunday he demonstrated this funky alphabet based on the work of Arthur Baker.

One of the demos that Charles did in front of class:

My own work on some cold press watercolor paper: