The Corel Painter Essentials v4.0.051

This release of Corel Painter Essentials 4 offers a completely
redesigned workspace that improves color selection and helps you
discover different brushes, media and paper. With the new video
tutorials and companion user guide, getting started has never been
easier.

More Natural Media®

• NEW RealBristle™ brushes: authentically
  reproduce the natural movement of the artist's brush right down to the
  individual bristle

• NEW Pens: such as the Scratchboard Tool
  and Smooth Edge Calligraphy, are perfect for inking comic books or
  doing calligraphy

• NEW Charcoal brushes: range from pencils to hard or soft charcoal sticks

• NEW Sumi-e brushes: let you create flowing sumi-e-style brushstrokes

• NEW Sargent brush: lets you paint in the style of master artist John Singer Sargent

TMCA Show to Display Traditional Calligraphy Tools

Tehran Times Art Desk

TEHRAN -- The Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art (TMCA) will be displaying traditional instruments used
for Iranian calligraphy this summer.

The tools, which include various kinds of pens, penholders, penknives, and scissors, are gathered by private collectors.

This is part of the great exhibition of masters of the nastaliq style of calligraphy which opens in early July.

Nastaliq is one of the main genres of Islamic calligraphy. It was developed in Iran in the 14th and 15th centuries and it has been popular in Persian, Turkish, and South Asian cultural spheres of
influence.

Three copies of the Holy Quran inscribed in nastaliq style by masters Hossein Mirkhani, Seifollah Yazdani and Ayatollah Najafi-Zanjani will also go on show.

Seminars on traditional and contemporary art of Persian calligraphy will also be held on the sidelines of the month-long event.

The Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry’s Office for Visual Arts, the Association of Iranian Calligraphers, and the Visual Arts Department of Tehran’s Art Bureau are the cosponsors of the event.

Tehran Museum is located on North Kargar St., next to Laleh Park.

Chinese Calligraphy: HAPPINESS

June 17, 2008 in Christian Living, Daily Journal, Encouragement, Faith, Life, creativity, learning by brucefong

Tags: calligraphy pictures, Chinese calligraphy, Calligraphy alphabet

An
old Chinese proverb says that a picture is worth a thousand words. My
recollection of the first time that I heard that adage is foggy. But,
I do recognize that I have heard it repeated many times in my lifetime.

It’s one of those sayings that fits with my psyche. For a long time
I have known that I am a visual person. That is my style of learning,
speaking and thinking.

The Chinese language in its written form is a system of pictures not
an alphabet. That makes for a complicated linguistic system that is
not easily mastered. Yet, it gives its written language an embedded art
form of calligraphy that is highly prized.

Culturally, the best educated have learned the discipline of
calligraphy. The product of putting ink on paper is an artform. It is
highly revered and beautifully symbolic as an expression of the culture.

You can read more of the story by Bruce Fong about chinese calligraphy

Renowned Calligrapher’s Art On Display

The exhibition at the Dalat Exhibition Information House is called “Fragrance Comes from the Brush” and is the result of Luan’s labors since the beginning of the year.

His inspiration comes from famous sayings, poems and literary works from all over the world.

Calligraphy means “the art of writing” in Greek. Originating in China, calligraphy made its way to Japan, where it was imbibed with Zen, and also spread south to Vietnam, a land where “life becomes art, and art becomes life”. Here it was simplified to make it more popular.

VietNamNet Bridge - More
than eighty drawings by the renowned calligrapher Nguyen Luan are on
public display in the Central Highlands town of Dalat until May 14.

When the first wave of Western culture came to Viet Nam with the French in the late 19th century, calligraphy began to fade. Feeling sorrow for the decline of the art of writing, a poet of the time wrote, “Sorrow fades the pink, and sadness drains the ink”.

In recent years, this valuable tradition of Viet Nam has been revived to regain some of its former prominence. A love of calligraphy among elderly scholars is once again being handed down to younger generations.

Moreover, a new trend has developed within the reincarnation of the old ways of Vietnamese calligraphy.

Latin characters have replaced Chinese characters to a degree and made the elegant art form more appealing to the general public.

Source: SGGP

Designer Imposters

The current plan for addressing the wedding invitations is to use

large circle stickers with printed addresses to match our stationery
design. However, after reading several posts stressing the importance
of calligraphy, I decided to explore my options before blindly
committing social suicide.

I recently ordered a sample of Laura
Hooper's work on etsy. I have to admit, seeing my name so beautifully
scripted on a USPS Priority mail envelope did woo me. My first thought
was "OMG. OF COURSE I need calligraphy!" But,
by the morning, I was back to thinking that it was too expensive. I
certainly appreciate the art form and it's purpose in the grand scheme
of the event, but at the end of the day, I am buying wedding shoes on
ebay and veils on etsy. A budget's a budget.

I started a discussion on The Unbrides Network to get some opinions and a gauge of my gaucheness. Justine Ungaro suggested that I check out Pretty Pen Jen.
Jennifer Cota's work is both adorable and affordable. And it also had
me thinking that I could try my hand at calligraphy. "Try" being the
operative word.

Pretty Pen Jen's Aubrey Font:

Image: Pretty Pen Jen

My attempt at an "inspired by" font.

When
I showed my six pages of samples to Andy, he said, "Ugh, I don't know."
My work didn't even warrant a "I guess it looks nice." It looks like a
5-year-old girl was trying to be fancy on the invites for her "tea
party" for Tickle Me Elmo, the cast of High School the Musical, and
Hannah Montana. The post office would probably scan all of them for
explosives.


You can read more of the story at: Tina's site

Calligraphy Artist: Laura Hooper

Laura owns LH Calligraphy and is pleased to be a full time calligrapher. She creates and custom designs maps, invitations and envelopes with the traditional feel of calligraphy with a modern twist.




Calligraphed design for your invitation suite is the perfect way to get the traditional look of hand-lettering that is customary for an elegant wedding. Each piece is hand-lettered in the style you prefer and then reproduced using high-quality printing methods such as letterpress, engraving, or offset printing. It looks great and is sure to make a lasting impression on your friends and family.

Visit Laura at her new Calligraphy site: Laura Hooper Calligraphy

Fun with the Alphabet

Two creative paths from A to Z. by Raymond Pirous|Fun with the Alphabet

Charles Roper thought I might like abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, a short film directed by Roel Wouters, featuring the work of his son alongside that of his brother and calligrapher, Job Wouters in a live jam session juxtaposing the lettering art of the youthful amateur vs. that of the aged professional.

The image below is a compilation of both sets of the alphabet as drawn during the film:

How Do You Spell “Publishing Excellence” in Japanese?

March 28, 2008 , and article by abbeville

Better yet, here’s another question: how many publishers do you know whose catalog even has an Alphabets & Symbols division, never mind an expanding one?

Following in the footsteps of Abbeville’s popular Maya Script, Arabic Script, Hieroglyphics, and Chinese Calligraphy titles comes our latest volume about a non-Roman symbol system: Japanese Alphabet: The 48 Essential Characters. In this book, expert polyglot Gabriel Mandel (author of Arabic Script) guides the reader through all 48 principal Japanese characters and their associated sounds, providing the roma-ji, or Roman phonetic spelling, for each. Also included are diagrams that demonstrate how to reproduce each character stroke by stroke, leaving you, the reader, just one fancy calligraphy pen away from writing in one of the world’s most elegant languages. If you’ve already bought the four volumes mentioned, you can even try combining all five ancient languages into one truly impenetrable secret code—or one hell of a party trick (”Any ancient Maya in the room?”).

You can read more of the article at The Abbeville Manual of Style

Create Your Own Calligraphy Alphabet Font

While every computer these days comes pre-loaded with an adequate number of fonts, sometimes you want to create your own. Maybe there's a special project like a family cookbook or class assignment that requires a personal touch. Or maybe your kid wants some AC/DC-esque Trapper Keeper lettering to show his classmates how much he rocks. Whatever the reason, here's how to make your own font.

What You Need

A scanner (optional)

Copies of professional design software (optional). You'll need both raster graphics software (like Photoshop or GIMP) and vector graphics software (Illustrator or Inkscape)

Fontmaking software like FontLab Studio ($650) or Fontographer ($350)

A hand-made font. Image: John Baichtal

How to Proceed

Step 1. Determine whether you'd like to create your alphabet purely in the digital domain or if you'd like to employ traditional media (pen and paper) to draw out the letter forms. If the former, go to Step 5.

Public domain type compiled by the legendary Rob Roy Kelly. Photo: John Baichtal

Step 2. Draw out the alphabet in black marker on a sheet of white paper. Remember, it can be a dingbat font -- if you don't want to do letters, that's OK. And even if you are doing a regular alphabet, don't hesitate to throw a couple dingbats in there for personality.

Traditionally, fontmakers start with the letters HAMBURGEVONS and adapt those to complete the alphabet. For instance, the E can be easily converted into an F. Don't forget accent characters, punctuation and numerals!

Alternatively, scan in and adapt public domain alphabets, such as those found in Dover books.

Step 3. Scan your work. I'd suggest grayscale or bitmap, at least 300 DPI and 200% zoom. Clean up in Photoshop or GIMP.

Step 4. shapes to vector graphics. The easiest way to do this is use Trace feature in Illustrator CS2 or higher. In older versions of Photoshop, you can use the Magic Wand to create paths Convert the the Object > Live around your letters and Export Paths to Illustrator.

If you are a perfectionist or have a lot of time, you can use the Path feature in Photoshop to draw curves around the letters using the Pen tool. This yields the crispest results.

Note that there is a plugin for FontLab called ScanFont that converts raster shapes to curves.

Step 5. Open up your font design program and cut and paste vectors in from Illustrator/Inkscape.

If you have elected to skip the initial steps and design exclusively in FontLab or Fontographer, you will have to draw the Bézier curves in by hand. This is much more difficult but also very quick. Most beginners prefer starting from Step 1.

Step 6. Kern, baby, kern. An "A" and a "V" can and should be much closer to each other than, for example, an "O" and a "R". Every font is different and usually you have experiment and find the correct distance.

Step 7. Export the typeface. Usually you have the option of selecting one of various font formats. "OpenType" is a popular choice -- This is the de facto industry standard and the file will work on Mac, Linux or Windows platforms. Older formats like TrueType typically work on only one platform.

Step 8. Install the font!

Can the Use of the Calligraphy Alphabet Improve Your Creativity?

We all know that Steve Jobs is the world’s second most successful college dropout. (Bill Gates, of course, is the world’s biggest failure).

But here’s something you didn’t know. After Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he went back to school as a drop-in and studied a subject that turned out to be vital to the development of the computer as we know it…

He took a course in calligraphy.

It’s hard to believe but according to a commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005:

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating….

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.

So there you have it. Whether you’re using a Mac or a PC, your computer owes everything to Steve Jobs’ understanding of the intricacies of sans serif.

The Creativity of Calligraphy
But we started to wonder what else a crash course in the art of writing might have done for Steve Jobs. Did all those curlicues and italics spark Jobs’ creative juices, get his ideas flowing and lead him to build a company that owes as much to the appearance of the gadgetry as the whiz-bang programming under the hood?

And what could it do for anyone? Could it help you to create a tech company as stylish as Apple?

Maybe, says Alok Hsu Kwang-han, a Chinese artist who specializes in creating calligraphic art, but it depends on you. He told us:

Practicing anything, including calligraphy, can enhance one’s creativity or it can reinforce an old rut and mindset! It all depends on whether you bring to the practice a willingness to be playful, to be fully present without expectations, to experiment without judgment, and to thoroughly enjoy yourself! The truly original creativity cannot be practiced…

I think Steve Jobs by dropping out of college and dropping into what he loved to explore, brought these qualities to his enjoyment of calligraphy at Reed College.

That potential to release creativity (rather than create it) is particularly true of Chinese calligraphy, adds Alok. Its technique allows the brush to move vertically as well as horizontally, and calls “the calligrapher to be very present and available to the possibilities offered in each moment of the movement. It offers an alertness and a letting-go that promotes creativity.”

Zen and the Art of the iPod
That’s all very nice but Steve Jobs was practicing western calligraphy rather than the sort of Asian brushwork that involves turning complex characters into flowing artworks. He was also talking specifically about the benefit of having a variety of fonts available on computers rather than releasing his own hidden creative talents.

And yet if you compare the sort of minimalist images produced by Alok Hsu Kwang-han with the stark style of the iPod with its white space and hidden buttons, you can’t help but feel that maybe there’s something to it. Even if Jobs spent his time learning Times New Roman and letter spacing rather than shufa and the thickness of xuan paper, could his being in the moment — while being in that calligraphy class at Reed College — have helped him to appreciate the value of having nothing but a click-wheel on the front of an all-white media player?

More importantly, could the creativity of calligraphy — and the sense of just letting go that comes with any successful endeavor — do the same for you?

Well, maybe not with calligraphy and maybe not with Asian calligraphy in particular. According to Alok, it doesn’t really matter what the practice or art form is; it’s the fit and the result that matters:

[It] depends on who the person is. Dance, theater, song writing, drumming, to name a few, are also good ways. I have discovered that calligraphy is a very good way for those attracted to engaging themselves in it. As Chuang Tzu says, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

You can read the rest of the story of How Calligraphy can Improve Your creativity