Or, “how and why this happened:”



My dad usually asks for books for his birthday, and I live near a convenient bookstore. His birthday party was this Saturday, and this Wednesday I asked him what he wanted for his birthday.

“Oh, how about some calligraphy?” he said.

“What about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I like Sondheim. Maybe ‘Send in the Clowns’?”

I don’t have any ideas for pieces involving ‘Send in the Clowns.’ But I have, for a while, wanted to do a piece about another Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park With George.

Sunday in the Park With George is about a bunch of things, but it’s written around the process of creating Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” You know, this thing:

The one with all the dots.

When you look at letters from far enough away, they look like dots. So maybe I could do that picture, but in calligraphy, and using letters instead of dots. And for the text, I could use a song from Sunday in the Park With George. Brilliant idea! I’m a genius!



I wasn’t going to do the whole thing, since I only had three days. I had to do something more manageable. Also, it might help to learn something about Pointillism. Obviously I couldn’t master Pointillism in three days, but maybe I could learn enough to do a down-market bad copy of Pointillism.

On Thursday, I learned that no, no I could not. Pointillism requires some rather precise knowledge of what colors the eye mixes together to make other colors. The parasol woman’s nose looks like this:

And a little experimentation proved that while I might be able to do that with calligraphy eventually, it would definitely require more trial and error than I had time for (not to mention the huge amount of time cleaning the nib and changing paints). I could not do color mixing as it exists in true Pointillism, or even a bad imitation of it.



By Friday, I had developed a plan B: I would do a solid color copy of part of the painting (the woman in the parasol, who in the musical is also a main character), and then write some letters on top of that. Maybe if the letters were slightly darker or lighter than the solid color, I could use them as a method of shading, and it would still look kinda-sorta like Pointillism. Brilliant idea! I’m a genius!

Unfortunately the only decent set of paints I had in the house were gouache, which is a water based paint. For various reasons I didn’t want to use it for this project: I’m bad at color mixing, I’m bad at judging how much of a mixed color I’ll need (so I’ll either run out or end up wasting a bunch), and it’s tricky to write calligraphy using gouache on top of more gouache.



Fortunately I remember that I had these:

Meet the set of colored brush pens that I bought in 2012 (when I still had money) and have barely touched since then. They are not water-based, so maybe they’ll play well with gouache?

Eh, good enough. Let’s get to painting!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH! No no no, no way in heck am I using that for anything, ever. Forgetting how embarassing the brushwork is, the Pentel color palette is just super garish.



Ok, plan C: I’ll combine the two plans, and do calligraphy of the woman in the parasol. But instead of doing true pointillist color matching, I’ll just do solid colors. So basically, I’ll do the above picture in calligraphy.

Yes, even though I just said that the Pentel color palette was way to garish for me to even touch. At this point I had about 12 waking hours left to finish, so my standards were quickly sinking.

Now I had never loaded a calligraphy pen with a Pentel brush pen before, so I kept screwing up and having to start over:

It was at this point in the project that /u/tomhasit asked me why, rather than starting an experiment that might well fail, I didn’t just do something that I was already good at. It’s a valid question, and the answer is that once I get mildly competent at something I get bored with it, so the possibility simply never occurred to me.

Eventually I stopped starting over, and wound up with this:

(technically I didn’t take a photo of this stage of the project, but I was able to reconstruct it by digitally erasing parts of the final version)



I mean, it doesn’t look terrible? (As a whole anyway, it was a rush job so the calligraphy itself honestly is pretty terrible). But it doesn’t look much like a woman with a parasol, either. Not even if you squint, or look at it from far away, or take your glasses off (I know, because I tried all of these things).

Ok, let’s go back to plan B, where we use Pointillist-esque techniques to add shading to solid colors. Maybe that’ll help?

Definitely better, but not quite there. I stared at the original Seurat some more, and made some more adjustments:

Could go either way. Maybe if I take off my glasses?

YESSSSSSSS.

Here’s a progress gif of the three stages:

My dad really liked it (once he took off his glasses), so mission accomplished. If I had to do it again, I would definitely do several things differently, most of them being “start earlier.”

Finally, because i can’t resist, I give you my picture in its natural habitat, with a bit of the proper soundtrack: