Minerals - Gabbro - Italian Script

"Having recently added a few more rocks to my collection, it seem'd like a good time to add another piece to my Mineralogy Script folder… Gabbro is form'd under high pressure & heat, deep within the Earth. Because it cools slowly it forms large crystals. Gabbro is similar to granite, and one of the most prolific minerals that make up much of the rock just below the Earth's crust, & most of the oceanic crust. Gabbro is often commercially sold under the name "black granite," & is used for kitchen counter-tops, floor tile, grave markers, & such. Gabbro is often mined for its titanium, magnesium, chromium, nickel, cobalt and other valuable metallic content. Its color generally ranges from black to green.

This specimen is Indigo Gabbro, containing black, dark green, & purplish-gray. — I've render'd this script in a very unique & peculiar form of Italian Hand essentially unknown today. It's my own interpretation of an American variant that was used ornamentally in the early part of the 17th century.

The idea for the "G" is based on one of my penmanship heroes, John Ayres, but I've pushed it to the absurd, just for the fun of it. The "r" is an extremely rare & purely ornamental form from the 1800s. Also, the most distinguishing feature of this style is the tapered shading with truncated terminations, rather than the club-like shades with rounded terminations normally found in Italian Hand.

If the shading technique looks familiar, that's because Spencer borrow'd it & integrated it into his penmanship style a half century later. When I release my book it will explain and demonstrate how this trait came into being. "

~2019, Don Marsh~
©2019 Don Marsh