hatam_soferet | Entries tagged with calligraphy

For what it’s worth, this is the paper I’m presently recommending to my students.

Scribes write on parchment, but parchment is mad expensive, and it’s foolish to take your first tottery strokes with a quill on the most expensive medium available. Much better to get started on paper.

But what sort of paper? You don’t want paper that’s too rough, because a quill won’t do smooth lines. You don’t want paper that’s too absorbent, because a quill won’t do crisp lines. You want a nice smooth – but not too smooth – paper that doesn’t absorb too much ink. And ideally, you want to be able to run it through the printer to print guidelines, because drawing your own guidelines is horribly boring.

Well, this stuff works. It’s not the only stuff that works, but you can buy it in the art store that’s nearest to the Drisha Institute, by whose courtesy and in whose classrooms I am holding my scribe class this semester, so it’s the stuff I’m using at the moment. And if you’re wondering what to buy, you could certainly do worse than this.

The picture links to Cheapjoes.com, which I use periodically; they are quite satisfactory.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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calligraphy,
safrut

I went to a talk at the Jewish Theological Seminary a while back, on the poetry of Yehuda haLevi. Specifically, two translators were talking about their approaches to translating haLevi’s poetry.

Those of us who work with Bible translations frequently have occasion to remark that translations are necessarily also commentaries, and this talk emphasised the commentarial nature of any translation, but from a more artistic perspective, which I found striking.

In particular, one got a fine sense of how these two translators take a poem and get inside it, inside the language and the words and as far as they can inside the mind of the poet – and having got there, they then describe what they see.

Here’s the first lines of the example they used:

הבא מבול ושם תבל חרבה
ואין לראות פני ארץ חרבה
ואין אדם ואין חיה ואין עוף
הסף הכל ושכנו מעצבה

Of course, what they see from the inside of the poem depends upon who they are, so what they choose to communicate and the manner of said communication varies tremendously. Scheindlin translates “Is this the Flood, and has the world been drowned? / You can’t see land, or beast, or bird, or man. / Are they all finished, lying in the pit of sorrow?” But Halkin translates “Has a new Flood drowned the land / And left no patch of dry ground, / Neither bird, beast, nor man? / Has nothing remained?”

This was interesting of itself, but it also gave me a perspective on artistic representation that is probably standard fare for any fine arts undergraduate, but since I make a living as an artist of sorts without the benefit of a university education in the arts, I had to learn it this way.

Specifically, the Hebrew poem spoke to these two translators in different ways. One was most struck by, and most focused on conveying, the poet’s use of rhythm and meter, and in his translation he tried to represent that. The other was more focused on the images and the power in the poem, and his translation spoke of that.

Accordingly, it made me think about illustrating a poem – as an artistic calligrapher, one’s job is to convey a piece of text visually, and one goes through a similar process. Sometimes you might want your writing to convey the imagery and feeling you get from the text, but sometimes you might want to use pattern and structure to convey a visual echo of the text’s own structure. A calligraphic rendition of something is also a translation, in a way, and as such it is also a form of commentary.

The sifrei kodesh, of course, have a strongly-defined mode of rendition, meaning that a scribe-artist’s capacity for commentary is severely limited. In ancient times, when the concept of writing was still new, I understand that the scribe’s role was frequently one of embellisher as well as transmitter, but today’s scribe does not have that aspect. Scribes do have some room for individual expression, and in fact I shall be exploring that in a session at Limmud UK, subsequently appearing on this blog, but on the whole, not nearly as much as does an artist-calligrapher.

In any case, I had not conceived of, or articulated, my calligraphic activities in quite this way before, and I shall be bearing it in mind next time I do something creative I’m not expecting anything profound, but perhaps it will serve towards understanding whatever it is I presently do instinctively. Cheers, JTS.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control…

And the bride and groom took that and turned it into wishes for their marriage. Isn’t that nice?

My black-letter script isn’t all it could be, but I’m very happy with how the illumination turned out. As well as vine leaves, the fruit motif is carried by apples, pomegranates, acorns, and holly berries – vines for general good biblical symbolism, apples for love and because they stay good in storage, pomegranates for commandments and fruitfulness, acorns for the strength and endurance of the oak, and holly berries because they are fruitful even in the depth of winter. India ink and gouache on paper.

OK people, yes, this is not actually a ketubah. And it has Jesus in it, on account of it wasn’t for a Jewish wedding but for a Christian one. Old friend of mine. But I’m still calling it “Fun with ketubot,” because it totally counts as a sweet wedding document :-P

Click to see it bigger. Large file; be warned.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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I may have spent the evening putting artwork onto mugs. Click mug images to buy at Zazzle.

My cup runneth over: This one’s particularly fine, I think, for hot drinks on chilly Shabbat afternoons at seudah shelishit, when people are singing “kosi revaya” anyway. Also good for people like me who tend to overfill their teacups from an excess of enthusiasm.

mug - my cup runneth over

Aleph and A: These are just pretty. I also have reish and shin, but not other letters. Maybe if someone were to ask nicely for a particular letter, I could do it.

mug - aleph

Procrastination: Because I totally am, and so are you.

procrastination

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Tags:

calligraphy,
crafts

So the last thing to do is fill in the text.

First I learned the script, copying the original quite carefully. Then I used the techniques I talked about last summer, for fitting ketubah texts into given shapes, to fit the text into the available space. Exact text blurred for privacy reasons, but you get the general idea.

We didn’t use the archaic version, with its interesting currency, highly-specific place-naming conventions, and fulsome honorifics. Such things tend to scare today’s rabbis, unless they happen to have a passion for ketubot, and you don’t want to be dealing with a scared rabbi, they’re a lot of work. So we did a very standard modern text, with Lieberman clause.

If you click on the above image of the new version, you’ll be able to see the final mem, whimsically extended to bring the text into an exact rectangle. Rather fun. The original stretches the last few words; this is another way of accomplishing the same thing, that’s all.

So now we have a new incarnation of this old ketubah, spotted in an archive by my client and envisioned by him as a fresh, shiny, new ketubah. The whole thing is really rather happy and lovely. I hope someone else wants a border like this; it was jolly good fun to do, and very interesting.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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Faced with the task of copying an image from the internet and scaling it up to ketubah size, how does one go about it?

Technique from primary school. Impose a grid onto your original, and copy each square into a scaled-up grid on your target medium.

Printing the original picture gave me something on standard printer paper – a good start, but not big enough. So I marked a grid with three-quarter-inch squares onto my printout, and made a grid of one-inch squares on my paper.

The three-quarter-inch squares on the printout helped me figure out how big the target letters needed to be, and roughly how they should be spaced relative to the borders and to each other.

To do the actual letters, I spent some time learning the script, first, so that it would be a process of natural writing, rather than copying shapes square-by-square. This meant that the reproduction wasn’t quite exact, but the proportions were right, and the general look worked out nicely.

Afterwards, of course, when you’re sure the ink’s dry, you rub off all the pencil marks, and then it looks pretty scrumptious. Allowing for the skewing caused by my imperfect photography, they’re pretty much just the same – nice, eh? I like this border very much.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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The ketubah text itself is a pretty standard text, with a few interesting features (click image to see bigger version; text reproduced in full below).

The date of the wedding was 7 Marhesvan 5592, or Friday October 14th, 1831. It was in Modena (which they would have pronounced Modona, hence the spelling מודונא ) – note the reference to the rivers Secchia and Panaro; this is how our most formal documents (not usually ketubot, today) locate towns. The groom’s name was Rabbi Mordechai, son of Rabbi Shimshon Mordechai Crema (deceased); the bride’s name was Bracha, daughter of Eliyahu Hayyim Modena. The currency is given as litrin; I don’t know as much about what this means as I’d like to.

The most striking variant from today’s standard text is the generous helping of honorifics. For example, where today we would say “the groom,” this text has “the glorious, honourable young man,” and followed by “may he see his children and his days be long.” “The bride” is “the respected modest young woman,” “most blessed of women in tents.” Her father is apparently also a rabbi, and his name is followed by “may God the Rock sustain him.” I rather like the extra level of formality this gives the individuals concerned, myself.

For my client, I used a text essentially similar, just more in line with “standard contemporary American” phrasing, insofar as such a phrase means anything. Further, it adds the Lieberman clause and the mothers’ names. (More about today’s standard text here.)

Here’s the text as in the 1831 version:

בששי בשבת שבעה ימים לחדש מרחשון שנת חמשת אלפים וחמש מאות ותשעים ושתים לבריאת העולם למנין שאנחנו מנין בו פה מודונא מתא דיתבא על נהרי סיקייא ופאנארא ומי מעינות בא הבחור היקר ונעים כמ”ר מרדכי יזיי”א בן המנוח כמ”ר שמשון מרדכי קרימא ז”ל ואמר לה להבחורה הכבודה והצנועה מרת ברכה מב”ת בת היקר והנכבד כמ”ר אליהו חיים מודונא יצ”ו הוי לי לאנתו כדת משה וישראל ואנא בסייעתא דשמיא אפלח ואוקיר ואזון ואפרנס ואכסה יתיכי כהלכת גוברין יהודאין דפלחין ומוקרין וזנין ומפרנסין ומכסין ית נשיהון בקושטא ויהיבנא ליכי מהר בתוליכי כסף זוזי מאתן דחזו ליכי ומזוניכי וכסותיכי וספוקיכי ומעיל לותיכי כאורח כל ארעא וצביאת הבחורה מרת ברכה בתולתא דא והות ליה לאנתו לכמ”ר מרדכי יצ”ו חתן דנן ואוסיף לה מממוניה עשרין לטרין של כסף צרוף נמצא סכום כתובתא דא בין נדוניא ותוספא ארבעין לטרין של כסף צרוף בר ממאתן זוזי דחזו לה וכך אמר לנא כמ”ר מרדכי יצ”ו חתן דנן אחריות כתובתא דא נדוניא ותוספא קבילית עלי ועל ירתאי בתראי להתפרעא מן כל שפר ארג נסכין וקנינין דאית לי תחות כל שמיא דקנאי ודעתיד אנא למקני נכסין דאית להון אחריות ואגבן דלית להון אחריות דכולהון יהון אחראין וערבאין למפרע מנהון שטר כתובתא דא נדוניא ותוספא ואפילו מן גלימא דעל כתפאי בחיי ובמותא מן יומא דנן ולעלם ואחריות וחומר כתובתא דא נדוניא ותוספא קבל עליו כמ”ר מרדכי יצ”ו חתן דנן כאחריות וחומר כל שטרי כתובות תנהיגי בבנות ישראל הבתולות הצנועות והכשרות העשויין ככל תיקוני חז”ל דלא כאסמכתא ודלא כטופסי דשטרי וקנינא אנן סהדי דחתימי לתתא מן כמ”ר מרדכי יצ”ו חתן דנן לזכות הבחורה מרת ברכה בתולתא דא תמ”א על כל מאי דכתיב ומפרש לעיל במנא דכשר למקניא ביה והכל שריר ובריר וקים

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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This design uses different sizes of letters to make a lovely rich lacy border. What are the texts it’s using?

The first text around the outside is Isaiah 61:10-62:1.

שוש אשיש בייﭏ תגל נפשי בﭏדי כי הלבשני בגדי ישע מעיל צדקה יעטני כחתן יכהן פאר וככלה תעדה כליה כי כארץ תוציא צמחה וכגנה זרועיה תצמיח כנ אד’ ﭏדים יצמיח ותהלה נגד כל הגוים למען לא אחשה ולמען ירושלים לא אשקוט עד יצא כגנה צדקה

I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels. For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations. For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.

It’s the first three verses of the haftarah associated with the Seven Weeks of Consolation, which falls out on Nitzavim or Vayelech. But it’s here in a ketubah because it’s also known as the hatan’s haftarah; in the Middle Ages it was a widespread custom for communities all over Europe and North Africa and beyond for the hatan to read this haftara in celebration of a wedding. This custom was extant at least up until the early 20th century.

There was a less widespread custom to have a special maftir for the groom as well; the verses from Hayei Sarah (Genesis 24:1-6). Traces of this custom remain among Syrian communities, who sing these verses (with Aramaic Targum) when the groom comes up to take his aliyah.

Anyway, this haftarah uses wedding imagery to describe the consolation of Jerusalem, hence its suitability as a haftarah for a hatan. In the weeks following the destruction of Jerusalem, the haftarot get more and more confident that the city will be restored, culminating in the joy of a wedding, and this haftarah.

The beautiful thing here is that in the liturgical cycle, we use the imagery of a wedding to evoke the nascent hopes of Jerusalem – but in the lifecycle, we use the imagery of the consolation of Jerusalem to evoke the nascent hopes of a marriage – as well as having this as a special haftarah in the wedding week, phrases from it feature in the celebratory meals, in the sheva berakhot.

אשת חיל מי ימצא ורחק מפנינים מכרה בטח בה לב בעלה ושלל לא יחסר גמלתהו טוב ולא רע כל ימי חייה דרשה צמר ופשתים ותעש בחפץ כפיה היתה כאניות סוחר ממרחק תביא לחמה ותקם בעוד לילה ותתן טרף לביתה וחוק לנערתיה זממה שדה ותקחהו מפרי כפיה נטעה כרם חגרה בעוז מתניה ותאמץ זרועתיה טעמה כי טוב סחרה לא יכבה בלילה נרה ידיה שלחה

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.

The text in the hoops around the edge is from Eshet Hayil, the last chapter of Proverbs. Interestingly, with both this and the other texts, you’ll note that the artist stopped halfway through a verse, when he ran out of space!

למנצח על שושנים לבני קרח משכיל שיר ידידות רחש לבי דבר טוב אמר אני מעשי למלך לשוני עטסופר מהיר יפיפית מבני אדם הוצק חן בשפתותיך על כן ברכך ﭏדים לעולם חגור חרבך על ירך גבור הודך והדרך והדרך צלח

For the chief musician, on “lilies.” To the sons of Korach. A Maskil. A love song. My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer. Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into thy lips: therefore God hath blessed thee for ever.

The inner layer of text is the first four-and-a-bit verses of Psalm 45, which identifies itself as “shir yedidit,” “a love song.” Sometimes it was done as the Psalm of the Day, on the day of a wedding, in place of the usual Psalm of the Day in the back of the siddur.

קול ששון וקול שמחה קול חתן וקול כלה

The sound of joy and the sound of celebration; the voice of the groom and the voice of the bride.

And this part, the biggest letters, is from Jeremiah; it appears several times, also in the context of Jerusalem, where first it is pronounced as a doom, and later is a promise of blessing.

Next time: the text in the middle.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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“Can you copy this ketubah?” my client asked me.

Since this is a Historical Ketubah, there aren’t copyright issues, as there would be if someone wanted me to copy a contemporary design. So I’m happy to copy it; it’s lovely!

“Copy” can mean several different things, though.

It might mean “make us a border that looks basically like this one, but write a ketubah text for our wedding.”

It might mean “make us a border that looks very much like this one, using historically-accurate materials, but write a ketubah text for our wedding.”

It might mean “make us a border that looks like this one, with historically-accurate materials and all design flaws and age-related decay, but write a ketubah text for our wedding.”

It might mean “Copy this in every detail; it is not for a wedding, it is for an historical re-enactment.”

So first one ascertains just how close to the original the client desires it. Turns out we’re doing option 1, for this project, but you see how the others are entirely plausible also.

The image here is from the archive of the Jewish National & University Library, the JNUL. (this ketubah) They have a ketubah archive online – in their words, “The ketubbot digitization project aims to create a worldwide registry of ketubbot in public and private collections throughout the world. Based on the collection of the Jewish National and University Library with over 1600 items, the project contains ketubbot originating from dozens of different countries, and covering a time period of over 900 years. It is a major resource for research in Jewish history, law and art.”

Nifty, eh? So we have this link, to an old ketubah, and now we’re turning it into a ketubah for a contemporary wedding.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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The Women’s Torah Project peeps sent me a pretty pretty certificate honouring me as one of the Sisters of the Torah, “dedicated to the discovery of ancient roots and the creation of powerful futures.”

Isn’t that sweet and generous of them? As I think I’ve said before, the project organisers really are rather a special bunch. What lovies.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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First of all, I fish out my Full-Colour Sourcebook of Historic Ornaments. I have a shelf of books I use for inspiration, and this is one that never fails. Highly recommended.

Turn to the Mughal India pages, because I’m in that sort of mood and I’ve got that sort of budget. I’ve been wanting to do something from this particular starting-point for ages. I know very little about Mughal India, except that it produced these kind of fantastically intense designs which I love.

Ask the letters how they want to be arranged. Let that dictate the shape in which they are enclosed. Sketch looks really dodgy at this point. If it’s a commission, this is what I send to my client along with whichever bits of artwork inspired me most, and I hope and trust that they can make the necessary leap of imagination.

Pen-outline main sections, for encouragement purposes, also for accurate painting.

Gold…

And blue and cream…

And the beginnings of flowers…

Almost everything…

There.

Clicky image to see bigger

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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calligraphy,
crafts

A meditation on the incremental nature of change, with interconnected letters and increasingly-flourishing leaves.

Attributed to R’ Abraham Joshua Heschel, although I truly doubt Heschel ever said that, such that if anyone can find me a primary source I will eat ~~my hat~~ broccoli.

Prints available for purchase in my Etsy store, just in case you have some people in your movement who need honouring.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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Now all the holidays are safely over (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, COLUMBUS DAY), it’s time to get down to the semester in earnest.

What about making this the year you get round to learning safrut? Especially if you’re in NYC and you want to learn it with me, because I’m thinking about taking a few years out of NYC starting next year, so carpe diem, etc.

There are a bunch of you out there who’ve been sort of thinking about it for a while. If a critical mass of people are interested, I’ll arrange halakah-learning, halakha-review, and practice-sessions.

By the end of the year, you could – if you give it your best effort – know enough to write your own mezuzot more or less independently, for instance. You would also have the basic skills to identify and repair pesulim in your community’s sifrei Torah, and the ability to determine whether that’s appropriate.

Logistics – I’m thinking Tuesdays p.m. from 5-8.30 or so; informal skills and chevruta from 5-7.30 and class-review of the week’s halakha 7.30-8.30. Unless no-one at all can do Tuesdays, in which case we’ll arrange Monday or Sunday by democratic process.

Cost – much as I would love to teach for nothing, there will be a cost. A semester’s fee paid in advance does wonders for keeping your motivation up, anyway. I think $250 for the seven weeks left of this semester, three and a half hours a week, but if that’s impossibly beyond you, say so when you email me and we’ll figure something out.

If you’re interested, email me this week or next, and we’ll start on the 26th Oct.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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Soferet desktop While I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, a quick post about how much I love pens.

Really. When the Soferet is miserable or grouchy, a trip to the art store is almost always a good plan. Pens are little tubes of potential, and they don’t cost much, so they’re good happy-making things.

Then you keep them in your pen-holder, and then when you want to create something, you’ve just — whee! — got all the pens you need, right there on hand. It’s very happy.

That’s my pen-holder there. Old shoebox, brown paper, and tape, and it holds a marvellous litter of pens for art projects.

I’m working on a rather exciting ketubah. More about that later; I also want to write you a few posts about liturgy and the High Holy Days here in New Frankfurt-upon-Maine, and about the Kohelet scroll I’m working on, and I think I still owe you pictures of Eicha, and I want to write various other fun things too, but at the moment it’s the ketubah, the other ketubah, the two other other ketubot, proofreading someone else’s Torah, writing Kohelet, and having masses of Yom Tov. Oh, and that Torah repair I still need to finish. Oy.

Tea’s ready. Back to work.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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This is the piece of artwork I was working on the week before last, a little piece of illuminated poetry. I had the most glorious time with it; waking up in the morning and bouncing out of bed going “ooh!” with anticipation, working long, long days at it because it was so delicious I didn’t want to stop.

As you can see from the text, it was for the wedding of Aryeh Yitzhak and Tamara Hana – if you’re reading this, I hope your marriage will always be as filled with delighful anticipation and fulfilling potential as this artwork was.

Clicky image to see bigger

I love it. I love how the blue and cream balance each other; I love how the flowers dance through the bands of background colour. I love how the edges of the bands are so bubbly and graceful. I love the curves and curls of the foliage, and how it looks so colourful but yet so light and fresh. I love the little touches of greenery, and how those are echoed in the border. I love the border, how it’s so rich and regular but also so simple. I love how the symmetry plays against the dense knot of golden letters in the middle. I love how the letters flow and snuggle together and together stand forth in glory.

I’m especially happy with it because when I look at it I have the sense that my eye is being led into a state of pleasureable befuddlement, which I think is the point of this sort of artwork – it’s commonly used in Islamic contexts, where it induces the slightly meditative state of mind contingent on being sensually overloaded. I feel as though I’ve really achieved something artistically.

Indeed, I enjoyed it so much that I am going to make one for myself, just as soon as I choose a suitable text. And I am going to make a maximum of three more, for prices which are not inconsiderable, but also not insulting; email me for more info.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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Here’s a rudimentary calligraphy worksheet, which you can use with ordinary calligraphy markers.

To do things like this:

( clicky for more... )

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calligraphy

Fitting text into shapes, the bane of ketubah artists everywhere.

First thing with funny shapes is to check them out with the officiant. Some officiants are DEAD AGAINST funny shapes – anything that doesn’t have four sides and right-angled corners. Others are okay with it so long as the lines are horizontal and any added words would look obviously wrong.

Today we’re fitting text into an eight-pointed star, and the question I most need to answer is “What size nib? what line height?” (This is one question, today.)

Playing around with my word processor (re-read Part 3 if you’ve forgotten), I can see that if I was using my beloved B nib, with its 9mm lines, this text would occupy 30 lines of 18cm each (for pity’s sake don’t forget the lines for the witnesses, and it’s a good idea to add a line or so’s worth of space just for security). That’s 486cm².

Now I want to work out the area my funny-shaped text actually needs to occupy. If all mathematical formulae fail, you can do it out on squared paper and count the squares, just like we did for GCSE. Make sure you don’t screw up the units. You do remember your high school maths, don’t you?

I like using metric because I hate working in idiotic fractions of inches. Eight-pointed star based on a 4.5-inch square…translate into metric, figure the area… I can’t use the bottom point of the star, because the witnesses have to fit in at the bottom one underneath the other…looks like my area here is 154cm².

Find the length scaling factor. GCSE maths again – when areas are scaled a:A, lengths are scaled √a:√A. My areas are scaled 154:486. 154/486=0.3168, so I can also say my areas are scaled 0.3168:1. So my lengths are scaled √0.3168:√1, that is 0.56:1.

So, to get the line height – if I was using my B nib, I would be using a 9mm line height. The length scaling factor is 0.56, and 0.56*9mm = 5mm, near as dammit. So I need to be using a 5mm line height, and a nib to match.

In my case, that means a quill something less than a millimetre wide, and in your case, well, you’ll figure out what you need to be doing.

I lightly write each line in pencil first, so as to get an idea of how to space the words on the line. Not all the lines, just each line as I get to it, until the last five or ten lines – then I pencil in the whole lot, to make sure that they’ll fit nicely. Sometimes doing this on tracing paper is better, so that you don’t do too much pencil-erasing on the Actual Ketubah. Depends how forgiving your surface is.

Erase the messy pencil lines, draw in a bit of a border, et voilà. Perfect.

So there you go. Now you know how to fit a ketubah text into any shape you like. Enjoy. Send me pictures.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Tags:

calligraphy,
layout

11-hour day working on the Non-Ketubah of Yumminess (it's for a wedding, but it isn't a ketubah). Not for deadline reasons either, just because working on it is utter joy. Had breakfast at lunchtime - bread and cheese and fruit, very bohemian - and lunch? or is it supper? just now, macaroni cheese left over from last Friday. Art Triumphs over Cooking And Food Preparation, apparently.

To finish the piece most beautifully, I want a .3mm felt pen; I will get one at the art shop tomorrow. It's a good thing I don't have one here, because if I did, I would probably be working on this until midnight or beyond, and it's good to e.g. go outside now and again.

Yes, there will be pictures. Later. In the meantime, I have a moral tale for you, thus: my green paint was drying up in the tube, so I poked at it with the end of my paintbrush until it was loose enough to come out. Then I forgot to wipe the end of the brush. The green paint sat there until I was engrossed in painting twiddly gold bits, when my ear started itching, so I scratched the itch with the end of my brush, and lo! now my ear is full of green paint.

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Occasionally I dip my pen, by accident, into my tea instead of into my ink.

When that happens, I wipe the tea off my pen, and dip the pen into the ink as per original plan.

But sometimes apparently I don’t get all the tea off my pen. A tiny drop of it lurks in the barrel, and when I’m not expecting it, it trickles down and lands in my writing.

Thus.

Tea and ink, not mixing

The three little dots are the gleams from my desk lamps, and the other gleam is the light from the window.

Blue sky and clouds.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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In an ideal situation, then, you have your .doc file, with the names and everything neatly filled in.

Next to the portable drafting board, the most awesome tool in the ketubah artist’s kit is – VARIABLE MARGINS!

Yes. You open your .doc file in Word*, and you mess with the margins. It’s great.

I’ve learned – it doesn’t take much fiddling about to learn with what fonts this trick applies to you – that with the aforementioned Broad nib, my usual ketubah script and Times New Roman’s Hebrew letters are spaced about the same. That is, if Word wraps Times New Roman text in a particular way, my writing is going to want to wrap at about the same point.

The other thing I’ve learned is that with a B nib, when I write the first line up to “alafim,” the line occupies 18cm. So in Word, I tweak the margin so that the first line wraps at “alafim,” and then all the other lines are wrapped for me! nice and neat! and I know that if I make all my lines 18cm wide, I won’t have any nasty surprises when things won’t fit.

Especially if you don’t fully-justify the text, you just right-justify it, so you can see which are the Short lines and which are the Long lines. Then you know which ones to stretch and which ones to squish so it’ll all look beautifully planned.

Then you say to Word, display line numbers please! and it shows you that there are 30-some lines (depending on precise text). So you know how many lines to write, as well.

* or proprietary or open-source equivalent, yes, blah, shut up, Word is the Kleenex of word-processors, generically ready to soak up tears and bogies whilst being challenged by cheap alternatives that will make your nose red. Um, what?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Tags:

calligraphy,
layout

Hatam Soferet

Jen Taylor Friedman's blog

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