Sosekido

The school Sosekido (素石堂) was formed by my sensei, Unkotsu Komine (小峰雲骨) many years ago. I was 13 years old when I first met him, and it was the beginning of my long-time calligraphy path.

Experiencing western calligraphy

I´ve been doing calligraphy since I was 9 or 10 but I had never tried western calligraphy. I like them, especially the arabic calligraphy is brilliant to me. But it never came to my mind to learn it. Then I saw an Ad saying that there would be one day workshop and tutor was Guiseppe Salerno who came to my very first workshop in Berlin about 3 years ago. And the nice thing was he remembered me. Now he is based in Truin, Italy and Valencia, Spain. It was just a good luck that I had found his only one day workshop in Berlin. So I joined.

 

We were welcomed with a envelop with our name in beautiful italic letters. Yes, the theme of the workshop was to learn Italic.

 

Inside, there was a manual of Italic letters. 

The workshop started. It was very interesting for me that we had to mark those five dots and some how it’s always 1cm. I found it clever. I guess the width changes depending of the nibs. 

 

Guiseppe wrote each of us a hand-written example. 

Practice started. Just to write “a”and “c”, I didn’t even realise how much time had passed. I was so concentrated on getting the right shape. This also happens to my calligraphy.

After the first coffee break, we started some small words to practice spacing. It wasn’t so easy to maintain 10 degrees of angle because it was Italic class.

Guiseppe showed us some brush technique too. 

 

After lunch, we had some more practice and move to our final project. 

This is my final project. I really liked the workshop and it was very good for me to understand how western calligraphy works. It’s not like I will do this professionally but I think I will keep looking for more workshops in future. 

Written by: Juju Kurihara