Elmo van Slingerland: Letters in Composition | 2-Day Workshop

Turn beautiful lettering into finished artwork using composition, movement, white space and balance with Elmo van Slingerland. Calgary graphic designers, typographers, tattoo artists, illustrators, sign painters and artists: I have something you might not realize is for you. When you hear “calligraphy festival,” you probably picture beautiful handwriting. Fair. But at the Flourish Festival of Letters & Art, October 21–25 in Calgary, we have artists coming from around the world whose work sits right at the intersection of type design, graphic design, lettering, typography, illustration and art. Take Elmo van Slingerland, coming from the Netherlands. Elmo is a calligrapher AND type designer. He studied graphic and typographic design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, worked as a type designer for Dutch Type Library, designed his own typeface and has taught postgraduate type design. Then there’s Montreal’s Marco Chioini, whose work explores letters as graphic forms through abstraction, scale, rhythm, movement and composition. And Renée Alexander, whose 30+ year professional lettering career has included work in film and television, including Little Women, Watchmen and Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. And that’s just three of our faculty. If your work involves letters, line, form, composition, branding, type or visual communication, there may be something here that sends you down an entirely new creative gopher hole. You don’t need to be a calligrapher. You just need to be curious about what you can do with letters. We have two-day and four-day options, and lunch is included, so you can come for the day, immerse yourself in the work, meet other ridiculously creative people and not have to disappear halfway through looking for somewhere to eat. Come learn. Experiment. Meet people. Play with letters. And maybe take something completely unexpected back into your own creative work. Have a look at the workshops: https://flourish-festival.com/ And if you know a Calgary designer, artist, tattoo artist or creative who would geek out over this, tag them. I would LOVE to get more of Calgary’s creative community into these rooms.