Georgia Angelopoulos
Victoria, Canada
B01 — Things Greek and Gilded
Four-Day Class, Monday, July 27 – Friday, July 31
Beginner/Intermediate
Design, Lettering
Exploring the rich history of Greek writing from its earliest appearance over 2500 years ago will help us better understand its crucial link to our own writing and expand our way of seeing and understanding letters. Examining various writing systems and styles as exercises will furnish interesting possibilities in our work. We will be using Greek letters and short bits of ancient texts, as well as devising Latin forms to harmonize with the Greek to write in English. Letters will be explored in terms of their pattern making potential, as well as unique designs in their own right.
To complement our lettering we will work with motifs apropos to each period gleaned from historical artifacts. We will create gilded and painted designs using a variety of techniques: flat gilding and tooling with various instruments, debossing, sgraffito, and cutting and collage with papers we will gild. We will also write on top of gilded surfaces and explore some of the traditional Greek palettes. Students will be encouraged to create a book documenting their explorations or work on a finished piece based on what inspires them throughout the process.
Supply List
- Basic Calligraphy Supply List plus:
- Speedball pens B2, B3, or B4
- Parallel or automatic pens if you have them
- Westwind calligraphy practice pad
- Tracing paper
- 2 pieces Saunders Waterford 90 lb cold press (or paper of your choice – cut into quarters)
- ½ sheet Fabriano Artistico 140 lb hot press for gilding samples (cut in half again)
- Cover paper for book, if you want to make one
- A few small bits of colored paper for gilding samples
- Glassine paper – minimum size 8″ x 10″
- Millboard 11″ x 17″ (or the back of a sketch pad!)
- Graphite pencil
- HB pencil (mechanical is fine in .5 or .3 mm)
- Removable tape
- Slant board
- Old brushes for feeding nibs and mixing
- Jerry Tresser’s gold size (I will have some to share)
- Gold leaf (I will have supply plenty but if you have some please bring. We will use patent gold – gold that is adhered to a backing sheet)
- Cotton gloves
- Good clean brush for wiping off gold skewings
- Burnisher, but only if you have one – I will have some
- Tools for sgraffito including old needles, crochet hook, empty ballpoint pen
- Needle and thread for binding book, if you want to make one
- A few oil pastels (I will have some)
- Gouache: bring what colors you like but please try to have zinc white, lamp or jet black, Prussian blue, Venetian red, yellow ochre, red ochre, and a gold you like (I use pearl gold by Schmincke)
- One or two tubes of acrylic paint for gilding (I used red oxide/aqua)
- Magnifying glasses if you need them them
Georgia Angelopoulos studied History in Art at Athens, Greece and at the University of Victoria. While she enjoys historical research, writing articles on the development of letterforms, the manuscript tradition, and calligraphy, her impulse to be a practitioner is strong. She is an active member of Victoria’s Fairbank Calligraphy Society; she teaches calligraphy internationally, contributes articles to their journal and is their Archivist. Her work was selected and featured in several publications including Letter Arts Review and Bound and Lettered. She has also contributed to The World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy and Mastering Calligraphy.