Florence woman writes her own success

Ellen Pearson is action personified because she works out every day, loves any kind of exercise and is learning to kayak in the lake behind her house.

It takes a great deal to slow her down, but she met her match when she took a course in calligraphy at Poynor Adult/Community Education Center seven years ago. She thought it would be fun and she would be able to address her children’s wedding invitations.

“I didn’t have anybody getting married at the time,” she said, “but I began practicing and practicing. I even took a correspondence course from a calligraphy expert in England.”

She was given lesson plans, then submitted her work and corrected her mistakes from his critiques.

Then she began experimenting with nibs and inks to develop her own style, basic Italia, which is changing the look of the writing by manipulating the width of the nib.

She works in a spare bedroom on a slanted board table that allows easy access to her materials. She began addressing invitations for friends and then branched out.

“It’s still a work in progress,” she said. “I don’t feel I’ve mastered it, but I keep learning. I love doing it and calligraphy has enabled me to meet a variety of interesting people.”

Learning calligraphy is far different from the way handwriting used to be taught in school.

“You actually have to sit straight toward your calligraphy work with a pen that usually has a flat-pointed nib attached,” she said. “I usually use Italic, which means holding the pen at a 30- to 45-degree angle and facing the paper straight on.”

Pearson started out using a fountain pen before moving to “dipping.”

“Dipping is where it gets to be so much fun,” she said, “because you get your fingers dirty, make smudges on the paper and have to start over. But you can do so much more dipping than you can with a fountain pen.”

And there are plenty of different nubs, or tips, that can be used. She’s just starting to learn the intricacies of a copper-plate tip.

“It’s really different because the point on it is just that, a point,” she said. “As you press down, the line will be thicker, but as you go up it gets finer.”

Pearson said it takes about 10 minutes to do an invitation. The most she has ever done is 600.

And it really took concentration and patience when she was commissioned to do something similar to a band of brothers quote for a veteran’s World War II scrapbook. She had to block out the placement of letters on the page. Then she had to decide how many words she would have per line so everything would be balanced.

How does somebody so active stand such tedious work?

“I don’t know what the reason is other than I love doing calligraphy,” she said. “It is something that gives me inner peace. Time just flies by when I’m sitting here at this table.”

And time has flown in other ways, too. Remember those invitations she was going to do for her children when they got married?

“They all three (two girls and a boy) were married in the last 22 months,” she said. “I got to address their invitations.”

Ellen and her husband, Jay, a Florence general surgeon, are Columbia natives. They’ve lived in Florence for 30 years.