January is the perfect month for allowing fresh ideas to come forth. Yesterday, while flying from Oakland, CA to Seattle, I was awed by the prominent peaks of the Cascade Range as they pierced the low cloud layer in all their frosted beauty. Ideas for teaching started coming into my mind like so many flashes off the wing of our aircraft. 

Curiously, the good old Schaeffer calligraphy fountain pen flashed into my mind. I've done very little sketching with this pen, but it offers so much as a drawing tool. This morning I pulled it out of a drawer and it was ready to go to work for me. Here's what I drew:

Coffee cup at drawing group meeting. Schaeffer pen (fine tip) and colored pencil.

The regional calligraphy conference, "Letters of Joy," will be held at Edmonds Community College in Lynnwood, WA on May 1 & 2, 2015. I'll be proposing two new 2-hour mini-classes, one of which will be a little workshop on using calligraphic fountain pens for sketching and letter writing. Why use a calligraphy fountain pen? Because the broad-edged nibs in these pens give us thicks and thins which create more textured sketches. In early days, hand-cut quills were used for drawing, yielding the original quality of varied line width.

As confirmations take place, I will post more detailed information about all 2015 classes I'll be teaching.