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 Fig. 5

08. ‘S’ 


This project offered the oppertunity to practise a combination of skills. Firstly, working at a larger scale, secondly the opportunity to experiment with design in a less traditional, abstract way and thirdly a digital component. Fig. 1 We decided to pick a letter that I found more difficult to draw; being an entirely curved  letter ’S’ is more challenging to get balanced. We decided to do that letter at 15cm high. Carving a letter at this scale requires skills in removing larger amounts of stone in an efficient way and is unlike the carving I have done so far.

Fig. 2 - 5 I came up with a few designs for the ‘experimental’ aspect of the piece, but decided on concentric ’S’s (a developed Fig. 3), which in theory is a simple design, but in practise the drawing needed to be accurate, whilst also achieving a precise finish would be essential to the success of the piece. As it progressed this piece turned into an exploration of the ‘v-cut’, which is an the essential attribute of cutting letters.

The piece of stone I worked in was Portland, a soft UK stone that is used a lot for headstones. The piece I was working with had jagged edges which we sawed down to size, in the process one of the edges developed a gouge, which was too deep to sand back. I decided to use this as a space to put my signature and cut the gouge out further into a circle, Fig. 7.

Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9 Fig. 10 Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Fig. 13
Fig. 6 - 13 First I carved the Trajan ’S’. Then I drew on the concentric lines and began roughing that out. Fig. 14 - 15 Cutting back the design didn’t take too long, but once I started to cut the design accurately I took my time, so as not to cut too deep and get the centre lines accurate. Fig. 16 - 19 In a similar way to the ‘torc’ piece I was cutting the v-cut up to a point, when finished the edges would be quite delicate. As the piece began to progress the suggestion of the finished piece with the chased texture, began to work well, Fig. 20. To finished this piece I may paint or gild it.

Fig. 14 Fig. 15 Fig. 16 Fig. 17 Fig. 18 Fig. 19 Fig. 20
The other part of this project was to develop my digital drawing skills and have the design laser cut in wood. For this I used Adobe illustrator to draw the letter. I have some self taught experience using Illustrator, but not for this specific purpose. Fig. 21 Charlotte showed me how to use points to draw curved lines and manipulate them into the curves of the letter. When you drop a point and attach it to another one, you create a line, each point can be manipulated from two sides to create a curve. The point along the line that is the peak of the curve can be moved and this forms the basis of constructing the letter. You link up all the points so that the letter is one closed unit, this means that when you alter one part, other adjacent parts might also move, overcoming this is perhaps that most time consuming part of getting the letter just right.

In terms of making my entire design digital I attempted to draw the consecutive lines free hand, but this proved quite difficult, as can be seen in Fig. 22, the lines didn’t match up as they needed to. Instead I used the lines I’d drawn on the stone as guides, which was much more effective, Fig. 23.

To enable the design to be cut in the way that we wanted I needed to make each layer an individual shape, which could be v-cut. As it demonstrated in Fig. 24, each layer having a colour.

Fig. 21 Fig. 22 Fig. 23 Fig. 24 Fig. 25 image copyright Hartwood Timber


Fig. 23 shows the preposed wood cut. We intend to get this cut ‘as is’ but also to get the reverse cut, so that we can take prints or embosses from it. Figs. 26 - 28 show the finished piece CNC cut in wood. 

Fig. 26 Fig. 27 Fig. 28


09. Italics ︎︎︎ 
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