Calligraphy with Powerful Gothics

The course is an immersion in the world of calligraphy through the Gothic script. Why the Gothic? Because it allows you to acquire very quickly and easily all the fundamental concepts associated with calligraphy and typography, such as rhythm, structure, formal coherence, the importance of spaces and counterforms.

Once these concepts are assimilated and with a well-established base, the idea of the course is to make more personal versions of the Gothic letter. We will experiment with different formal variants and with many pens, pens and improper instruments, many of them homemade.

We will work on two styles of Gothic calligraphy. First, medieval Gothic based on the letter models of the book "Les Grandes Heures du Duc de Berry" from the year 1409 will give us a coherent basis of the letter of its historical context. It does not make sense to study the modern gothic letter models that are included in the typical manuals of the type "Learn you calligraphy" but we must look for the original sources, in this case the Gothic manuscripts. In second place we will study the gothic letter models of the German calligrapher Rudolf Koch (1876-1934). Koch was the best calligrapher and typographer of his time and at the beginning of the twentieth century, he redefined Gothic calligraphy written with a square-tip pen.