Gilding the Lily

Page 2

Calligraphy – Automation

Whilst real calligraphers might be turning in their inkpots, you may not have the time to devote to a handcrafted album page. CorelDRAW is particularly good for getting computer-aided design off to a flying start. The Creative Suite, reviewed in this issue comes with 1,000 high-class fonts as well as a number of illuminated capitals, which can be used as placed objects on the page. The capitals may be imported into CorelDRAW and then broken into individual components. You may then adjust the colours to match your album colourscheme, as well as deciding on the placement of the gold leaf. You could also use the computer to rough out your design then print it with the object fill turned to “none” and the stroke set to 0.25 points in a 5% grey. This can then be printed to a paper of your choice and filled in with ink and paint. While there are those who would deem this as painting by numbers it is in reality using technology to do the legwork – nobody expects a novel to be written out by hand these days even though the original illuminated manuscripts were intended for being read out in public. Whilst you are weaving your intricate designs, don’t forget the old monk’s tradition of including a deliberate mistake within the intricate weaving of Celtic knots and twists. This was an expression of not trying to outbid the Almighty and seems like a good tradition to continue even into the computer age. Islam has taken this notion one step further and banned the making of images of God’s creatures – hence the fabulous tradition of Islamic and Arabic calligraphy and their complex and intricate woven patterns and mosaics.

The use of vectors

As we said above, the vector-based program CorelDRAW is a good one for creating calligraphy at speed. Also in this class are Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. You can also adjust and colour vector objects contained in Adobe InDesign.

If you do not wish to use pre-prepared fonts you can always draw your own alphabet and then use Corel Trace or Illustrator Live Trace to vectorise the letters after you have scanned them. This way the alphabet is uniquely your own, but you can rapidly reproduce new lines of text. If this is all too much then you can use InDesign to lay down your script, have more options to adjust your lines and you can place your illuminated capitals as in-line objects. See the call-out box for the quickie way of using InDesign in this manner. It is incidentally exactly the way the text in this feature was prepared.

The drawn letters from CorelDRAW (above left) are copied into Illustrator and the fills and strokes are toggled to “none” (top right). The Pattern Fill at [A] is used to fill the main body of the letter, Pattern [B] is used for other parts and finally, to add depth, the Gradient [C] is created and used to fill the remaining portions. The letter is shown above. It may or may not be to everybody’s taste, but it was executed in under a minute so you have time to try out the options! Once the Pattern Fills are created they may be used over and over as well as scaled.

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Photo Quote: I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find hoto- graphing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. -William Albert Allard