#grass script

The soft tip of the pen is just the right amount of flexible to allow for easy thickening or thinning of the lines, and the rough texture of the paper gives it enough friction that it never feels like the pen ISN'T writing on something.

Excellent combo, loving it!

My calligraphic dictionaries. The big black one is an old one I found a long time ago. It’s the most comprehensive of lot. With over 3000 different characters covered , if a character isn’t covered chances are we’ll be able to construct one if it’s a compound character composed of more common characters. 

Tricky to do in any given style I've created with brush pens, but it seems to imply a style all It's own with these.

As it has been requested, here it is! I will also be submitting this script to omniglot.com later, just to see if they find it interesting. 😆

I created grass script as an alternative way to write English because of two reasons: I find the Latin alphabet visually boring (if efficient...), And I prefer vertical scripts over horizontal ones. So...this 5-6 year project was started because I wanted something more aesthetically pleasing to write with, that could reflect the beauty of not only the words but also their meaning.

So I started with the question: what do I find aesthetically pleasing in writing? What kind of writing styles look like art as well as functional writing to me?

Turns out, I like curves and circles and flowing lines and writing systems that look 'organic': shapes that borrow from natural forms. I was weeding a garden and then took a walk out an abandoned grassy lot when inspiration hit: weeds and grass and other bits of light, dried wild plants being caught by the wind, and slowly drifting to the ground. The basic shapes for letters, rooted in a single, curved, downward stroke, were born then.

But I also wanted something that I could eventually learn to write relatively quickly if I wanted to, and that could be written with more than one writing tool: pen, pencil, brush, marker, stick in the dirt or sand, etc. So I decided to stick with simple curved lines, dots, circle, leaf and drops. But I also needed each letter to be recognizable at a glance, and later, distinguishable even in messy-looking clumps and combos.

Then I needed to find a distinctive 'look' for it. And it turns out the 'look' that I like the most is an awful lot like Chinese characters. Chinese characters are, however, also blocky and square, which led me eventually to one particular variation of them called 'Nushu' , a more organic and plant-like variation of it. Go check it out! It's gorgeous, and its influences on grass script are very noticeable.

But enough stalling!!! Here's the key that was requested, with additional info and tips.

First! The consonants! :

I'm sure the basic stroke used is obvious: a curved, diagonal line downward, with the distinguishing letter-features being mostly on top (with noticable exceptions) and a long stroke downward directing the flow of writing. This feature is a combination of wanting a very vertically oriented script that would lead the eyes downward, and an imitation of wild grass stems and leaves with seeds/buds or bent tips to give each letter as unique a shape as possible.

It also helps with the 'stacking' writing style, giving each letter a curve to follow by the previous one.

Stacking is not, however, the only option! Lots of letters can also 'cross' each other in certain ways:

Which in turn lends itself to part of its original inspiration: handfuls of long, wild field grasses clumped together, falling down wildly when dropped in the wind. There are obviously more letter combinations than this, but I think this illustrates the basics well enough to follow...

The vowels, by contrast, are essentially diacritics who's size and orientation can vary according to the needs and space available between consonants. It's actually not unusual for me to write out the consonants first, and add in the vowels afterwards because of their visual simplicity and variability:

'a' is simply 3 dots in a triangular formation, with how spread out or close together they group being variable.

'e' is just 3 dots aligned, again with some variability in spacing being flexible.

'i' is essentially either 'leaf' or 'drop' shaped, and can be oriented in any direction.

And 'o' and'u' being a simple circle and single dot, there isn't much variation to be had, but as a rule the single u dot tends to be larger than that of the dots of a and e.

How to fit them into good looking grass script? There are two basic ways: following the curves of stems, and 'nesting' them into the 'bends' or corners of letters and letter combinations:

Which brings us to actually writing words! As you may have noticed from the above crossing consonants, the letters stack diagonally downward in a 'top-left to down-right' fashion. As in a previous post, the general rule when reading or writing is 'left before right, top before bottom's, essentially following the flow of the stacking. Since we want to keep the writing vertical rather than letting it go diagonally ad infinitum, we need to limit the number of letters wide that any given word can go. I find that 3 is a good guideline for this, though of course this script was designed for narrowness, so it varies between words...

As you can see, the letter 'm' adds a bit of a complication to this, and therefore also adds variety of possible aesthetic shapes and flows to each word. Another good guideline is to make a point of continuing downward as much as possible in these words, even if it means you can't follow through each curved stem or use the usual 'stacking' method.

So you might end up with several possible combinations and letter placements for each word, with only aesthetic choices being the final decider...

Here's two ways to write 'grass script' as an example, with stacking and crossing choices happening in each word, as well as vowel orientation :

Only thing left is punctuation! And punctuation is where two simple features a shoved together in various ways to make lots of different marks. Two dots, and a long, straight line:

Obviously not a complete punctuation list, but because grass script was created for both aesthetic and simplification purposes, it still remains limited, with only the important being here.

Now, since tumblr mobile won't let me add any more images than 10, I'll reblog this post and add a few examples of text in the reblog.

Hope this was both informative and enjoyable! Toodles!

Not bad, but clearly something I'd need to practice more to actually make it look good.

First in Sasuur:

And in my grass script:

Fun for everyone!

I've also started designing different 'styles' or 'fonts' for grass script that I'll eventually post here as well!