A Survey of and Introduction to Calligraphic Tools

These ongoing courses have been designed to either introduce you to calligraphy, advance your proficiency or just catch you up on things that you might have forgotten and for those more advanced, a good time to practice. These offerings should be great for any level student, including beginners.

Date: August 3, 2019  

Time: 9:00 am till 1:00 pm 

Instructors: George, Peggy and Ann

Place: Memphis Northeast Police Precinct, 6850 Appling Farms Pkwy, Whitten exit North off of I-40

Price: $10.00 member, $15.00 non-member

George Harmeling, Peggy Kunkel and Ann Rabinovitz will be showing and demonstrating a plethora of calligraphy tools and how they work.  

The workshop is designed as an overly ambitious introduction to beginners, and refresher for experienced calligraphers, to the commonly used tools of calligraphy and some of the less commonly used tools.

It will include examples, demonstrations and opportunities to try out some of the tools. 

We will survey nibs, broad and pointed, pen holders, straight and oblique, and other mark-making tools, including automatic pens, folded pens, ruling writers, brush lettering tools. We’ll be showing some of the tools used for aligning marks on paper, the inks and writing liquids:  bottled Sumi, stick ink and ink stones, gouache and watercolor and pencil, graphite and pastels. We’ll include examples of ink wells, and similar storage and mixing methods. Tool and paper storage and carry devices. We’ll have examples of slant boards and ultrasonic cleaners and will discuss cleaning and maintenance of nibs – pretty much what every over equipped studio and calligrapher might want in the way of tools and equipment.

There is no supply list, but you are welcome to bring any of your calligraphic tools that you might not know how to use, or any that you want to share with others that might be unusual.  And you might want to bring a notebook with pencil or pen in order to take notes.