Days go, and you begin to realise that it’s all about the process. So many things start to happen that you have no time for anything. You spend more and more time at school. Come early in the morning and leave late in the evening. You have lessons. Then you go to the shop, buy all the stuff for writing and start to practice. First of all, writing with a brush. You write at school. You write at home. Everywhere 🙂 You also write with a pointed nib. First week just all types of lines. Then you can start to write words. Another important thing, apart from practise, is watching. You should look around as much as you can. Look for interesting books and letters. The more you see, the better. First of all, you have lectures where you see lots of everything. Supernice, but if we are told about something, we can see it live. It’s a totally different impression, when you look at the book in reality, not on the screen. Thanks to Jan Willem Stas for that. We have excursions too. Amsterdam Special Collections last week, Gemeentemuseum next week. School library. They have an amazing second floor there. And many-many books about everything. When you look at things you always see something interesting for your work there. For example, I found a book on the flee market. A Baedeker guide around Paris, 1907. It has really amazing engraved maps. So I tried some of the letter shapes from there for my writing with a pointed nib. Now we gradually move from writing to drawing. But writing is a basis. Our first assignment looks like this. We take a brush, and write HO aeon (b, d, p, q) gost. Then, we use this writing as a skeleton for our drawing of these letters. Normal contrast. So you write first, then draw the pencil outlines on marker paper (it is transparent), then revise spacing and draw again with a black marker.

Lots of work, but at least we still have time on the weekend to go somewhere and enjoy Holland 🙂