Italic calligraphy course

Italic, also called Chancery Cursive, is the broad-pen hand that is often associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. The beauty of this style of writing comes from maintaining a consistent pen angle, and the resulting thicks and thins create a fluency and movement impossible to achieve with a rounded or pointed pen tip. The Italic calligraphy course will provide the learner with the basic materials, vocabulary, and techniques to begin and continue italic calligraphic lettering in broad pen and ink. Students will receive sample alphabets to study and will learn the full lower and upper case italic hand, as well as numerals. Each student will be able to create beautiful place cards, envelopes, and frame-worthy works of poetry and art with their new skills as well as increase their appreciation for the time-honored tradition of gorgeous hand-lettering.

Calligraphy classes offer you more than a chance to relax, have fun, and learn a time-honored skill, they also increase your hand-eye dexterity and aesthetic awareness. Learning this beautiful handwork will slow you down consciously and bring artistic intention and a creative community into your life. And Catherine is a lively teacher who doesn't hesitate to share her hard-earned secrets!

Anyone can learn this time-honored skill, and there is nothing Catherine enjoys more than helping others develop this beautiful practice. She offers beginner and intermediate classes in broad-pen Italic and the pointed-pen Copperplate styles, and she also holds one- and two-day workshops for holidays, envelope addressing and other specialty areas. In addition to adults, she also offers lessons to young people both in her home and at local schools when her schedule permits.

Catherine has always loved art, creativity and color. As a child, her favorite gifts were always art supplies: the paints and crayons, the yarns and Shrinky Dinks, the markers and the glossy finger-painting paper waiting to be smeared with reds and blues! At the age of 8 or 9, she received her first set of calligraphy pens and immediately set to work with the little handbook, trying to mimic those letter shapes. She had been struck at an early age by the gorgeous envelopes penned by her mother’s father, who had died when her mother was 15 and whose memory always carried some magic for her. And genetics do play a role; her mother's sister did graphic design, and her brother, father, and uncle all make their livings with various forms of painting and art. So Catherine entered college thinking she’d become an art teacher, but poetry and creative writing lured her over to a major in the literary world. However, she did take a single-credit calligraphy elective, and that class (while not much in the way of a formal calligraphic education) did change her appreciation for the lettering arts forever. After graduating, she commenced ten years of teaching junior- and high-school English, with an emphasis on creative writing and poetry, but she always had one hand in the visual arts. Her favorite way to relax after a day of teaching and grading was always by creating something, whether it was painting some room a bright color, knitting a scarf, designing a stained glass mosaic project, or practicing calligraphy on the family’s Winter Solstice cards.