Month: September 2020

Latin in the movies!

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Now for five Latin phrases that feature in five favourite films.

Tried to find more, but this seems to be something of a niche as I couldn’t find too many lists of films with a Latin phrase. Might just have to find other famous phrases instead!

Written with my trusted Speedball C3. Controlling the ink flow by only adding a tiny drop with the Sushi Fish dropper seems to be the key!

Here’s the answers if you got stuck 🙂

The answers for those who found one or two a bit tricky!

Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem – Monty Python & The Holy Grail

Libera te tutemet ex inferis – Event Horizon

Vi veri universum vivus vici – V for Vendetta

Romanes eunt domus – Monty Python’s The Life of Brian

Orbis non sufficit – The World is Not Enough

Arrogant and Offensive

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Today’s calligraphy practice in copperplate script comes from a famous tweet from the UK Civil Service back in May 2020 that was swiftly deleted. It made the news!

Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?

I’m still slightly out of practice here and you can tell, particularly with the spacing of some vowels up against consonants, like the word “and”, and “you”. Word spacing has improved on the previous work, with only a couple of excessively-distant words in there now (the spacing between “Can” and “you”, I believe is the ideal, where there is only just a break between the trailing stroke of the “n” and the leading stroke of the “i”).

On the limits of this paper & ink combination, as you can see some bleeding happening where the inks gone down a bit thick and been absorbed into the paper.

A very limited and specific way

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A current affairs-related quote for today’s calligraphy practice. This one is in relation to a comment made by Brandon Lewis MP in the UK House of Commons regarding the upcoming Internal Market Bill.

This does break international law in a very specific and limited way

I’m slightly out of practice, and it’s been a couple of weeks since I last had a practice session. You can tell quite clearly with the word spacing between “does” and “break”, and again on the second line, between “specific” and “and”.

I am using a guide sheet with diagonal lines at 55degrees, however I think my leading strokes into the next letter is making me too liberal with the spacing, and then the first letter of the next word ends up too far away from the previous word. Something to work on!

I believe slowing down between words and being more conscious about the spacing before I start to write the next word will help this. We’ll see how that goes next time!