Influenced By Bamboo

[William]

A few days ago I was doing some gardening and was moving some bamboo canes.

Some time later I was wondering whether the canes could be used to make letters, maybe setting them out on a lawn and then photographing the results.

I thought of making a font along the same lines, maybe the letters could be square and such that they could be used vertically in a caption, maybe in a soft colour, to give an oriental look to a picture where the text is in fact in English. I tried a few experimental glyphs.

I may well have been influenced by something I learned of some years ago named New English Calligraphy.

I first learned of this from the following posting.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /1100.html

If you need a username and password for guest access to the archive, they are on the following page.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/

It was using that page that I have just found the link mentioned earlier in this post, by searching for "New English Calligraphy".

Searching for "New English Calligraphy" at http://www.yahoo.com produces various links.

Anyway, yesterday I continued and produced a font which has most letters of the English alphabet in a first attempt form. It is just a stage in production of the font yet I have uploaded it to the web. It is named Influenced By Bamboo 002.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/INFBY002.TTF

Actually it has a collection of validation errors in it due to my having experimentally altered a glyph during testing, after validation, and forgetting to go back and complete the union of the contours and validating again. However, it is what was produced at the time and so I am not going to change it now.

I was trying to set the following haiku, which I wrote some years ago, in a vertical setting at 24 point, using Serif PagePlus 10 with CMYK colour Serif 06-05, which is CMYK = (55, 0, 95, 0) and which translates to RGB = (145, 192, 60) and is a shade of green which I have just found can be produced in Microsoft Paint if anyone wishes to try the font out and does not have a desktop publishing package available.

An impression made
Personality signet
Quality of wax

I found that the x in wax looked as if it were a capital I, so I tried changing it by adding the bar across the centre. I knew that they all looked the same, in fact I had produced the x earlier and copied the I and i from it. I am wondering about changing the i by removing the top bar and adding one of the short vertical lines to the side of the two long verticals as if it were a dot. This is because I am trying to produce the letters using just two lengths of bamboo canes, as if an artist carries two bundles of bamboo canes and uses them for making letters.

Maybe, influenced by the New English Calligraphy project I should make some glyphs for whole words, such as for "the", for "and", for "of" and so on. That would need some shorter canes and a larger display size.

William Overington

23 September 2007

[William]

I have now produced a later development stage of the font.

It is named Influenced By Bamboo 003 and is available on the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/INFBY003.TTF

The contours of the x have been joined.

Glyphs for D and V have been added.

Glyphs for i, J, j and .notdef have been altered.

There are now glyphs for A to Z and a to z and for a few punctuation characters.

William Overington

24 September 2007

[William]

Earlier this morning I tried producing an A3 size picture using this font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/impression.pdf

William Overington

9 November 2007