Maia Gaffney-Hyde

My Lettering Arts Trust Apprenticeship started on the 10th January 2023, with master carver Charlotte Howarth in West Acre, Norfolk. My apprenticeship will last 2 years, the first 9 months on a part-time basis. I am the 10th LCAT apprentice. 

Lettering Arts Trust Apprentice 2023-24




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Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

07. Lowercase


Fig. 1 - 4 The next stage of my apprenticeship is to learn lowercase letterforms. In order to understand the lowercase letterforms we did some brush lettering. We used a flat edge brush, about half an inch wide, a larger brush makes it easier to draw smoother lines, which we held at 30 degrees. One of the key factors that separates a lowercase letter from a capital is the triangle of space that is created where the lobe of a ‘b’ or ‘d’ intersects the stem. There is no lowercase version of the Trajan capitals so the lowercase ‘minuscules’ develop out of ‘unicals’ and written handwriting.


Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7
For this piece there was quite a lot of work to be done on the stone before starting the carving. There was a chip on one of the edges that we filled and coloured with graphite powder. We also had to grind back the working surface with an angle grinder to remove scratches Fig. 5 - 6. Once the stone was square we sanded the working surface back ready for carving. Fig. 7 shows the slight discolouration at one end of the stone.

Fig. a Fig. b Fig. c Fig. d
I already had in mind a sentence to carve, riddle 69 from the Exeter Book, Fig. 8 shows a page from it . The Exeter Book is, as it sounds, a manuscript left to Exeter Cathedral in 1072, written a hundred years earlier, composed of a collection of poems, among them 94 riddles in Old English. The riddles differ from other verse of the time in that they have a focus on nature and the domestic, answers including; book moth, mead, plough, onion, oyster. This is one of the reasons that attracted me to them. I should add that none of the riddles have answers written for them, and some are still not known. Over time the answers have been deduced and agreed upon, although some are still up for debate. The riddle I choose to carve is only a fragment, and it is unclear whether is should have been taken as part of the preceding riddle, 68.

Wundor wearð on wege; wæter wearð to bane
On the way a miracle: water becomes bone.

On the way a miracle: water becomes bone1

As this is a short sentence, which already has two clear parts, it made most sense to keep the layout simple and have two lines.  Fig. a - b shows my design process, starting with layout and developeing the letterforms. This layout also suited the piece of stone that was available to carve on, a piece of Welsh slate, which happened to have a slight discolouration that had a suggestion of water on it. Fig. 9 - 12 show my layout tranfered to the stone.

Fig. 8 Fig. 9 Fig. 10 Fig. 11 Fig. 12
The letter forms were carved at a slightly smaller scale than I might have in another stone, 2.8cm, but as I was carving in Welsh slate, I could achieve a higher level of detail. Carving the lowercase letterforms gave me a lot of experience in how much movement is involved in carving, as there are a lot more letters with curves, compared to the capital Trajan letters. Also the fluidity of motion needed to get a smooth curved line.

Fig. 13 Fig. 14 Fig. 15


The letterforms are sans serif. There is a flow in the letter where the uprights are waisted and bulge to one side at the top and bottom. Such as the ‘a’ in Fig. 15.

Fig. 16 Fig. 17 Fig. 18 Fig. 19 Fig. 20 Fig. 21
Fig. 16 - 18 Once the carving is complete I thoroughly cleaned the dust out of the letters before painting. Freshly cut the letters retain the carving dust and have a legible grey colour, but without paint the cut letters take on the colour of the slate. We painted the letters with two dilute layers of sign writers paint, to emulate the light grey of the freshly cut letters.

Fig. 19 - 21 I wanted to somehow include the answer to the riddle in the carving, as this completes the viewers interaction with the piece. By chance, in this translation the word ‘ice’ can be found in the word ‘miracle’. I decided to gild the letters ‘ice’ in palladium.

1  Translation © Kevin Crossley-Holland, used with the permission of Enitharmon Press.   

References

The Exeter Book Riddles, trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland, Enitharmon, London, 2016.
The First Poems in English, trans. Michael Alexander, Penguin Classics, London, 2008.






My Lettering Arts Trust Apprenticeship started on the 10th January 2023, with master carver Charlotte Howarth in West Norfolk. My apprenticeship will last two years, the first year on a part-time basis. I am the 10th LCAT apprentice.






© Maia Gaffney-Hyde MMXXIII
© Maia Gaffney-Hyde MMXXIV