107 glyphs!

I was doing the calligraphic style of kuraw tonight by hand and wow, i
counted 111 known glyphs of the script, both simple and complex conjunct
characters. My hand hurts, it's such a task to do the calligraphic
variant, i can see why the Saalangal only use it for very special
purposes! It's very pretty though. Imagine being a child and expected to
know all 107 glyphs, plus the vowel and diphthong diacritics, and the
accent and vowel killer (Virama), that's about 117 different marks to
know, AND you have to know them in the three major forms, each one being a
bit different from each other.


It's really easy to do the calligraphic base characters, but the conjuncts
get to be more involved and complex. Some look like they're made from two
different glyphs, although most look the same as they should if you just
joined two glyphs together. My favorites that are tricky and don't really
tell you the two base glyphs from looking at them are tsa, tya,tma, and
tla.


I have it in mind to do a bunch of paintings of single calligraphic
characters and embellish them like illuminated manuscript capitals.

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