Before starting the NATO run, I worked through Arthur Baker’s book of swash capitals. The straight brush also loves the blocky forms of Rudolf Koch’s Neuland. The two got mashed together here.
,
,
,
,
After tower defense on Blooket, They made me a night zombie, Seeking brains in the dark while They hid under folded sleeping pad huts.
Brains, brains!
Morning comes the sun! Away I go! They ran into the playroom to fortify With pot lid shields and Miso containers shooting arrows.
they waved their arms like noodles splayed legs meander through the bedroom if you get close to another blarg blarg, give them a big hug! i blarg-ed Mama.
~
he said i was a ready monster. ready, reaady, reaaady flapping little arms like a t-rex
~
i’m an oig monster walking through the kitchen hunched over bent chicken wing arms
~
a baoulu baoulu hovers around the safe zone breast strokes to swoop kids hopping off their beds dragged into the dark
It took many tries to get the two tone brush to work. I don’t recall being happy with any of the results, even after the edits in the computer. Another month later, I’m really happy with this one.
,
,
,
,
,
they piled stuffies on the chair and called me to the room
I stood behind the chair and held up my hand
she grabbed a plastic tube set it down, dropped a quarter, and pushed the joystick
Even a 9×12 sheet can’t fit a 3″ brush without ligatures and a pile of failures.
At this point, it’s only remarkable when I’m satisfied after a few attempts.
,
,
,
,
,
Years ago, we bought a toy bird for the girl that records and repeats short snippets. The boy is now well past her age then, but two fresh batteries and it squawks again.They’re upstairs, talking, singing. and laughing at distorted tweets.
In the other ear, Mama is on the phone, searching nutrition labels for high protein, high calorie foods to stem Grandpa’s weight loss.My mind searches for anything to thread these competing conversations across electronics, but I come up empty.
This year roughly followed the seasons, with one big break.
Winter started with a monthly focus on new scripts—finally bearing down on Italics, Gothic, Copperplate, and Roman Capitals.
We bought the boy Paul Jackson’s Cut and Fold Techniques for Pop-Up Designs which I promptly commandeered. It completely changed Spring as I cut and folded through all the designs in his book.
Pop-ups are fun, but I hate photographing them, so I returned to the ruling pen in Summer, focusing on cursive. Splatters are addictive!
Then a big break September with a week in the hospital. Not fun, but I’m grateful for the wonders of modern medicine.
Autumn started with my recuperation through Inktober and then walking through the NATO alphabet. It officially became a challenge season when I dived into Callivember with the kids’ watercolor sets.
The last weeks of this year are closing out in two directions.
I’ve graduated from Crayola watercolor pans to a tube set of gouaches. OMG, I love opacity! Gouache works great on colored construction paper, and I’m now painting my hand, which pairs nicely with old hand sketches for the NATO alphabet series.
With free release of Affinity, I also started making zines. We even purchased a color printer now that I discovered the existence and efficiency of tank printers. So now I need to publish some zines to justify this purchase!
And for 2026? The good news is that I finally got traction on the 2024+2025 theme of “Catching Up”, plowing through my old blog drafts. I’m only halfway through those drafts and never got around to dormant home projects, but it’s time to move on.
“Curation” is my word for 2026. Life is packed full of interesting things and I need to make some hard cuts—”if it’s not exciting or veggies, then NO!” Even more than the past few months, I hope to embrace the cult of done (or trashed).
Aside from my “exciting” calligraphy, blog, and zine projects, I got the usual list of “veggies” that everybody else has with the new year—a never-ending list of home projects, controlling my diet (nutritional and digital), and creating a regular exercise routine.
So yeah, goodbye to 2025 and here’s to a fresh start in a couple of days, just like every morning!
I occasionally moan about taking multiple attempts to lock in a piece. Since I’m only doing this for fun without professional obligations, I quit when I run out of steam in a session. Otherwise I’d be taking exponentially more shots to get something right.
After testing Scorpio a few times on pre-used sheets, I had a decent run of attempts on blank sheets. I took them all downstairs for final selection, but my deciding brain wasn’t working that morning.
So I scanned them all for this blow by blow commentary.
I’ve need to practice the foundational hand again. But a rounded script wasn’t right for this prickly creature.
Still, you gotta try an idea a few times, to make sure it’s a dead end.
I next tried a sign script. It was a fun challenge to morph the blocky S into a swoopy tail. I was hoping the contrast might look cool, but it felt chunky.
I love the transition on this S to the swoop, but you can see where I lost concentration on the last O.
On the top piece, I tested compressing the script, but it felt even more chunkier. I went spiky with gothicized italics, but with a twist by going wide. I’ve been trying to figure out wide pointy O’s, but that wasn’t getting solved that morning.
I like how the glitch at the stinger makes sense for a scorpion but left too much space between the R and the P.
I dipped a bit too much water for the O, otherwise I might have picked this one even though I don’t love the joint at the S.
I preferred the stingers from the previous two examples, but the letters and spacing came together nicely, which is are the most important aspects in this digital age. Once scanned, I pushed the color towards a punchy rust orange instead of the faded brown from the children’s watercolor set.
So there’s 10 attempts at a word. I suspect more folks should share their process and their failures. So here is my contribution to rectify this absence. Maybe I’ll get really good one day and won’t have to take so many attempts for each prompt, but that’s a problem for next year.
