Out of the gate with a bang

Last year, after having done calligraphy on-and-off for some time (mostly off), I got the brilliant idea to make a birthday card for a friend. I don't know where I got the idea to make a card, since I had never done one before, and never a project of this type. I had done bookmarks for my schools four years ago, and three years ago I had begun planning on a huge project--a handwritten Bible, but nothing had come of it (well, not yet, anyway). So this card idea was a radical idea.

The funny thing is that a lot of books on calligraphy have a section on various projects--usually bookmarks,, certificates, and birthday cards. Problem was, I didn't like the format these cards have, and I was looking for something that would represent a common link we had (we're both Hungarians). I decided I would create my own format--something that would allow me to showcase calligraphy, and still be able to personnalise it. While going through the embroidery pattern books we had at home, I found this pattern from Kalocsa I loved. It was a pattern for a tablecloth or runner, and at each end was a bouquet of flowers. I loved how this bouquet of diverse flowers blossomed out of a large centrepiece rose. The flowers were coloured with coloured pencils, in a way that would (attempt to) resemble embroidery thread, to give the impression the flowers had been embroidered onto the sheet.

The border is a well-known Hungarian folk greeting/blessing song, usually sung at birthdays by Hungarian scouts (another common link), and was written in a Cancelleresca script, in blue, so as not to clash with the blue cornflowers, and the main greeting was written in a flourished italic script, in red, to tie in with the rose. Of course, I'm not entirely satisfied with the result. The border script wasn't calculated out precisely, and as a result I ended up writing the song one-and-a-half times around the edge, and I hadn't spaced out the lines of the main greeting correctly, giving a cramped look.

However, I did manage to salvage the capital B. That scared me, right at the beginning of the final calligraphy.

All in all, for a first try, pretty good!

This is what I can remember a year after the fact...