The Quay Brothers are known for their unusual calligraphy (at least some likely harvested from references and archives):
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Heh I got it right (and I can write it correctly) but I can honestly say that the only reason is that I was really really bored in 8th grade Texas History class.
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My cursive was awful, so about a year ago I taught myself Arrighi’s chancery Italic hand in an effort to make my writing actually legible. It’s worked out pretty well. Still haven’t settled on what capital F or T I like, though.
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I have to disagree there, though the rest of your post is spot on.
Rendering and effectively reproducing an image that looks like the subject matter is not a mere matter of effort or attention to detail; some people could spend a thousand years practicing drawing and still never get the hang of it, because that understanding of proportions and relationships you spoke of is a talent which not everyone possesses.
The same is true of any creative endeavor, IMO.
For instance, anyone with working vocal cords can technically ‘sing,’ but only those with talent sound good doing it.
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I used to take all my notes in class in cursive. Your comment has just revealed to me that that skill is almost completely gone. Just tried to write ‘The Quick Brown Fox…’ and had no idea how to write the Q. None of your options feel natural, so I wonder if I had a different version?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to lament the loss of a skill I used to be fairly proud of.
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Let’s be real about what we are talking about. That double-storey g is nothing more than a printers preference used in order to put more lines on a page. It is not a normal or standard lower case g. The ISO lower case g looks like a g. That double-storey g is nothing more than a stylized and highly modified g that printers like. It has been used so often that it is now considered equivalent to the real g but we all know the real truth. A double-storey g is just a buji g.
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You made me guffaw. And then I realized I checked this thread by navigating away from my search: “Chandelier arm glass crystal replacement vintage”. Now, THAT is buji.
Wow. Very curly.
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&($&77&@))&@@“,~~~<!!!
Now I cannot remember how I write a capital Q anymore.
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In other words, printers played some jazz with the normal g. Is that correct?
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Mrs. Perlenfein taught us to make upper-case Q’s that looked like a script number 2, but it had a tail on the bottom left. I never liked them, and as soon as I was out from under her thumb, I started making Q’s that looked like O’s with a tail.
I’ve always liked both of these letters because of how flowery you can make the capital versions. Sometimes i would alternate between different variations, but these days i would likely have to really try and would end up looking at examples to make sure i’m doing it right. Either that or just print the capital letter and then break into cursive.
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I honestly don’t remember either but i know i’ve used all of the variations i posted.
The experiments suggest our knowledge of letters can suffer when we don’t write them by hand.
Yeah, or maybe it’s because a written g loops in the opposite direction and doesn’t have a little antenna on top.
Intimate familiarity with hand-printed letters makes you more likely to “fail” this test.
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I agree that this is nonsense since the “g” shown here is never hand written.
On the topic of cursive versus print however, I have always thought that some of the letters in the standard cursive alphabet taught in schools in the U.S. were equally ridiculous. Lower case “r” and “s” and several of the capital letters including “G” are hard to write and make cursive difficult to read, especially for people who never learned cursive in the first place.
But this past year I found something that takes care of all of those problems, a system/book called “Write Now” which teaches a very simple italic alphabet wherein all the letters are basically the same in the printed and cursive versions.
The lower case “r” and “s” look like normal printed versions of those letters and just join from where the printed version normally ends making them much more legible. All of the capitals do not join and are just freestanding at the beginning of the word. And several letters such as “g” and “y” never join to the letter that follows them, making them more legible and less easily confused.
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You, sir or madam, are a goddam rockstar!
I salute you and bow in obeisance to your cursive awesomeness!
If you ever decide to become our looptail-g overlord I, for one, will welcome you!
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While I agree that there are genuine physical limitations involved in being very good at some activities, in most cases saying that someone else is naturally talented when they have actually put in the time and made the efforts that we haven’t is our egos’ defense mechanism for dealing with the fact that we aren’t as skilled as we want to be.
That understanding of proportions and relationships I mentioned can be taught, and is a skill that can be learned. Maybe not perfected - however you would define that, but definitely better than it was before.
There is always the ability to improve ones drawing ability somewhat - if the person has typical eyesight, brain function, eye-hand coordination and manual dexterity - the same things it took to learn to write, for example.
Learning drawing skills may require working with a teacher/coach, and lots of practice, learning how to really see what’s in front of you and what to look for to create a likeness, and developing strategies on how to start a drawing and how not to be overwhelmed by the task.
I have zero natural artistic talent - seriously, none. But I had a strong interest in learning to draw and I worked goddamned hard to create inelegant yet recognizable likenesses. Really fucking hard.
I’ve never been able to draw as well as I’d really like - which would take even more focused and attentive work, and these days and at this age my hands are too far gone to arthritis and nerve damage to even print clearly anymore.
I do accept the fact that it comes more easily to some people than others - sometimes much more easily. But it’s like working with a therapist, you have to do the work, and no one can do it for you. You have to live at the very edge of your comfort zone, pounding with your fists and butting with your head as hard as you can to make it a little bit bigger, day by day.
It also takes a degree of humility as well as tenacity. I was always the shittiest artist in my university art classes, and the instructors were fairly ruthless in their public criticism of our work. I didn’t really view it as a competition though - just a statement of where I was at that point. I couldn’t improve if I only focused on how good other people were, how “talented”, so I kept looking for ways to improve my own work.
It took the same kind of humility to live in other countries and learn to speak their languages. I have whatever the opposite of perfect pitch is (without being stone deaf). Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, where words that sounded just the same to me had completely different meanings.Oh. My. God. That was so tough. After two years - many of them attending daily Chinese classes, I learned to make myself understood, somewhat. But it sure wasn’t pretty.
At least most Chinese people could see that I was making an effort, (so many foreigners didn’t), and many of the people I dealt with had better English than I had Mandarin. When I was in France for two years it was more like, “Sacré bleu! What are you doing to my beloved French language!?” Or they’d tell me that they didn’t speak English and walk away, when I’d been speaking French to them the whole time.
So yeah, in the cases of drawing and languages it was lots of focused effort and lots of humility - being willing to look the fool, and constantly looking for whatever ways I could improve my skills. I’ll repeat this point for emphasis - saying that someone else is talented when they have put in the time and made the effort that we haven’t is our egos’ defense mechanism for dealing with the fact that we aren’t as skilled as we’d like to be.
I’m not talking about absolute mastery and perfection of a skill, just doing it better than you used to. There’s always going to be someone better, or for whom a particular skill seems to come more easily - whether it’s singing or math or languages or drawing or breakdancing.
Fortunately for me short, fat, tone deaf, clumsy guys can learn to draw, or speak French understandably - it just takes more time and effort for some of us, and it helps to be willing to be content with relative competence rather than insisting on absolute mastery.
And I would love to help you learn to see the proportions and relationships of visual elements and learn to draw a recognizable likeness, but you’d probably do better by borrowing a copy of Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or maybe Rudy de Reyna’s How to Draw What You See from your local library, and then faithfully doing what the books instruct you to do.
You have to figure out for yourself how much time and effort you’re willing to put into it, how much tenacity and humility you’re willing to approach it with, and allow yourself to let go of your feelings of incompetence and frustration.
Talent is a fun subject to discuss. It’s real, but it’s not everything.
My 2¢
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Curricula in STEM classes are generally not set by individuals, but by committees in negotiation with other departments. I would love to teach half as much material per semester as I must in my freshmen/sophomore classes. As it is, the only way my students have a shot at keeping up with me is to go over the part of the text I’ll be talking about before my class, then take what notes they can, then fill in the rest after class, maybe with some friends. (And the students who do all of this tend to get As.)
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Holy… I write very much like that, except I’ve never even heard of that particular letterform. Weird.
i find this one super fascinating. I have a dysgraphic tic of some sort. The lower case d and g, when I write OR type them… switch. About 1% of the time. Since forever. That said, I saw the four options and chose #3 and didn’t think about it for a split second. I’m very much not dyslexic, but, oddly, sometimes I write d’s and g’s wrong. Or type. That I do it typing sometimes is what gets me.
I wish everyone had a dumb foible like this, and laughed about it.
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