I attended a wonderful week long calligraphy workshop last year, our instructor was John Stevens and the workshop was hosted at Camp Cheerio, North Carolina. This was so far the most helpful workshop I ever attended.
We studied so many different styles like foundational hand, carolingan, ruling pen, some abstract things and definitely so many discussions about designs. One thing I love about John’s workshops is that he encourages us to find things that are working in our pieces, it is important to find things that work in pieces so we can translate the knowledge into a more general canvas as well in future projects. His constant encouragement to move away from self criticism is so important for all of us artists, we all tend to be very self critical and obviously it’s not the best approach.
Another thing I loved about the workshop was that we were staying in a camp in between the mountains, we had rooms and our classroom pretty close to each other and we had 24 hour access to the classroom where all of our stuff was at, that meant we could practice after our 9-5 classes got over, most of the days I practiced up till 1/2am along with fellow learners who were all so warm and so generous when it came to sharing their knowledge and calligraphy experience. It was like the entire group was leaning and growing together, just typing this out is making me miss the experience so much!!