Calligraphy Expert Works on Perfection, Down to the Letter
Dash of elegance adds to any card or piece of artwork as she teaches the craft to others.
When she delivers the mail, an elegantly scripted envelope always catches post office employee Barbara Singer-Boocher’s eye.
They remind her of courtly curves on the hand-addressed birthday envelopes that arrived from her uncle Joe when she was a child. And how she tried to mimic his calligraphy.
“I would practice lettering during cold winter nights in Wisconsin,” Singer-Boocher said.
When she moved to Bonita Springs in 1985 and worked in banquet service for The Ritz-Carlton, Naples, Singer-Boocher created German-language menus for the resort in her Chancery calligraphy, a Roman style of lettering.
On a recent morning, Singer-Boocher — who is also a watercolorist and offers hand-painted cards, artwork and paper designs — worked at a desk that is illuminated from underneath inside her home studio. She carefully looped a purple pen across her third calligraphy draft of fellow artist Linda Liles’ poem, “A Cup of Love.”
Half the secret to the script lies in selecting the right pen for the job, and a felt-tip marker is almost always a good choice.
“It’s a constant, steady flow of ink,” said Singer-Boocher, who letters holiday cards, wedding invitations and more.
During Singer-Boocher’s monthly calligraphy classes, students learn how to hold the tips — or nibs — of their pens at 45-degree angle while they curl lithe letters across lined paper.
They sit at a table scattered with issues of Bound and Lettered magazine while they work and leave with a folder filled with letter samples, warm up exercises, blank cards, copy paper, etc.
Lora Jellison, of Lehigh Acres, took the class with her 14-year-old daughter Margaret last year so they could learn how to address their Christmas cards in calligraphy.
“Barb was very encouraging and she gave us plenty of materials,” Jellison said, adding that Singer-Boocher kept coaching them via email.
Singer-Boocher recently joined the Coastal Calligraphers Guild in Sarasota to further hone her scripted style and to help keep the romantic art of handwritten words alive. She can hardly wait for her first meeting with the group.
“If everybody is there with the same (calligraphy) desire, I can’t imagine how electric that might be,” she said.
Barbara Singer-Boocher offers calligraphy classes,lettering services, and hand-designed cards in Bonita Springs
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