March to Lucy and Julie - Tom the student

 

Lucy's is very similar to the three that ran yesterday but I added the gray shadow. It's a nice touch. I wish I had made the name larger.

Julie's is something different. I'm fine with it. The outline on the stamp is a nice touch with the solid outline on the name. Straight lines do not coordinate very well with floral design. But it was worth a try and not a disaster. Julie is a nice name to work with. This is a fun font which I highly recommend. You do not have to be a calligrapher. I might ask my grandkids to try writing some names in this style and see what happens.

***

Remember when I described the wide range of people in my classes? Everyone thought that calligraphy was so pretty and looked like fun. Only a few people were cut out for the tedious work it takes to build the skill of traditional calligraphy so I started to come up with ways to give the other people something to do that felt fun and doable.

Enter Tom, a student. Tom was a retired guy and not very talkative. I did not grill new students about why they signed up for calligraphy. Tom was a big guy, with big hands and I could see that he was struggling with the daintiness of the size of lettering that works for most people. I pulled out something big for him to write with and got some big paper - and suggested he just follow along at a larger size.

Voila!!! I don't like to brag - but my little problem solving experiment turned out to be a raging success. Tom remained quiet and towards the end of the session of classes he told me that he was really enjoying painting big signs and posting them in his yard. Wow!!! That's bold. I was really curious to know what the signs said, but I remembered that sometimes it's better to not ask for too many details. As I recall, he had a little twinkle in his eye about his signs and made a vague reference to stirring things up a bit. Maybe he moved on to other activities - or maybe he's been churning out signs and enjoying his retirement. 

During one of the classes, I brought up the topic of skill level and said that there is another spectrum that is not skill based it's just a difference - two ends of a spectrum - and I said I needed a way to differentiate between two things that were wildly different - but neither was *good or bad*.

Tom said, "Sheep and goats."

Yay, Tom!!! That's perfect. We have the broad spectrum for skill, tomorrow we will dovetail it with the Sheep and Goat spectrum. I guess we did end up with a three-pronged spectrum.