Steve Husting's Calligraphy

Birthday cards for work

For about a year now I’ve been doing the monthly birthday cards for the company’s employees. In the past, the company bought giant Hallmark cards, large enough for every employee to sign, and they were given out once a month at a get-together in the company lunchroom/meeting hall.

My sister, who also works there as the bookkeeper, saw my calligraphy and suggested they ditch the cards and have me make them instead. So I bought a pad of 18 x 24″ paper and used normal markers to make the cards. Then at Aaron Art Mart I purchased two oversized, 15mm Acrylic paint markers, red and blue, and tried them out. The letters look much better with them. The above will go to the two birthday boys for this month, rolled up with a fancy ribbon placed around each, their names and year lettered on the outside edge in Uncial. At 18 x 24″, it provides plenty of space for everyone to sign.

I finished my second version of Joy to the World. The problem with the first version is that although the word joy was there, the “joy” wasn’t. So this version was an attempt to put the joy into the work. It accomplishes that better than the first attempt.

I used brush and folded pen to do the preliminaries sketches for the “Joy.” You’ll see them all in the video I made of the process. As you’ll see in the video, I painted the letters below “joy” by tracing the letters with a light pad. Then Joy itself was outlined with colored pencils, warm tones on the left edges of the letters and cool tones on the right. The paper color was allowed to show through the letters themselves. The video doesn’t show it, but after all the painting was thoroughly dry, I heavily retouched the letters with colored pencil to form the letters nicely where the painting was uneven. I used gold gouache to fill in some of the counters. Continue reading →

Joy to the World – preliminary

I created this piece recently, but it’s not turning out the way I wanted. I thought I would put it up here, because it’s still nice to see!

Joy to the World – preliminary

After many preliminary sketches to decide which way to take this work, I finally finished Hark! today.

Calligraphy by Steve Husting, finished 12/27/2014

Continue reading →

The last few classes of Barbara Close’s workshop in November were spent learning gold leaf gilding on an intricate illuminated letter. We transferred found fancy artwork to our papers and added the color and gold leaf. I found this pattern on the Internet and it became my project.

Illuminated O class work, Nov. 2014

Continue reading →