The days should be getting longer now, but you wouldn’t guess that, looking out on the uniformly grey sky and continual rain and drizzle. The goldfinches visiting the feeders add a spot of festive colour as they gather on the sunflower hearts.
A suitable day for me to press on with the exercises in Sassoon and Briem’s Improve Your Handwriting. After a week or so completing twenty-six A5 pages or exercises from their course, I’ve still got some way to go, but I have got to the stage where doing any writing will be good practise, so I’ve gone back to my notebook and I’ll try to write something every day, even on a dreary day like today when there hasn’t been very much going on.
Nothing except making progress with joined-up writing, something that I should have tried long ago. I feel that the pen movements that are gradually becoming second nature should benefit my drawing too.
Reading more about the subject, I realise that the way that I was taught joined-up writing in my second year at junior school when I was aged 8 or 9, was a version of copperplate. The loops in copperplate make it easy to make the joins, but they can make the writing less legible.
As a schoolboy, as I worked on my comic strips, I turned to block capitals for legibility and when I got to art college and got into typography, I tried to incorporate the letterforms that I became familiar with into my handwriting. But lifting the pen to draw letter individually breaks up the flow. Hopefully as I get into the flow of handwriting, I’ll be able to improve the shape of the individual letters.
