PRIMARY TOOLS & MATERIALS:
INK, SCANNER

Additional Tools & Materials: nib holder, pane of glass, white printer paper, ceramic tile, Adobe Photoshop

To make this letter, I combined ink and computer hardware; in this case, my scanner. I had originally planned to ink some letters directly onto the glass scanner bed, but I couldn't justify the mess that would make. So instead I drew some letters in blue calligraphy ink onto an 8x10" pane of glass, placed that onto the scanner bed, then positioned two ceramic tiles on the glass to keep the bed from closing fully onto the still-wet ink. This created a shadow behind the letters, visible in images 5-8. After capturing those images, I placed a sheet of white printer paper directly onto the inked glass, then allowed the scanner lid to close completely. As expected, this squished any ink that was still wet out beyond the letter's edges, making a total mess of some letters, rendering them illegible. Images 9 and 10 were the only ones still legible after pressing the ink under the paper. 

I was most drawn to the first set of letters scanned with the lid slightly open. The shadow behind the letter was particularly interesting, giving them a dimensionality that conflicted with the flat, opaque shapes created by the blue ink. To take this study a step further, I adjusted levels and exposure in Photoshop to make the shadows more distinct. The results are twofold - as you can see in image 1, the shadow is deeply contrasted in black and red against the blue edge of the letter, but more important is the banding that becomes visible within the body of the letter due to the way the scanner captures the image. I chose image 1 as the cover for this study because of these characteristics, and for its abstract, dynamic form. These same characteristics are visible in image 3, which was created in the same way.

In image 2, I used the "posterize" filter on the image, which allows you to reduce the image to a certain amount of colors. I chose 5, which cleanly separated the shadow behind this lowercase script L. This character appears to stand with its back against a wall and a light in its face.