Carl Rohrs' Workshop - Pen, Brush, Stiletto

Over a long weekend in the middle of June, in a small village southwest of Cambridge, the superb American lettering artist, Carl Rohrs, held a truly memorable workshop that will be one of highlights of this year.  I'm positive everyone who attended would agree.  At times the array of tools and techniques Carl demonstrated could be quite bewildering - pointed brush, flat brush, folded pen, cut-paper lettering - but I'm sure it'll all sink in gradually with further practice using his unique and comprehensive workbook as a reference. 

Carl’s incredible lettering workbook for "Pen, Brush, Stiletto"

Here are some of my practice sheets using various tools : pointed brush, folded brass pen, flat brush.  The difficulty lay not in using the brushes or pens as such, but in manipulating them to attain the desired effects!

We also designed and cut a 3D letter in paper, which had a fantastic effect once all the coloured layers were stacked in their proper order.

And finally...cut-out silhouette lettering with a decorative background.  I was finishing this in the final stages of the workshop and, looking at it again, I think I could have chosen a better background.  Somehow  the Japanese Chiyogami paper suggests my home village is somewhere in the Far East of the world rather than the far east of Essex!

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