more about painting the letters

My friend Karin lives in Ethiopia. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia. I remember when she was planning to go there and trying to learn the language. Depending on where you read about it, there are over 250 letters! Some say over 400! As I understand it, there is a different symbol for each syllable. But that is as far as I can tell you. For this piece I am working on, I used an English/Amharic site on the web.
If you are interested in knowing a bit about Amharic, there is a lot of information about the language at this website, including some audio clips.

Anyway, here is a bit more about how I did the lettering. I used this technique for both the Amharic and the English because of the font.

I trimmed away the top and bottom of the letters, leaving them attached in the centre.

Then I traced round the letters.

As you can see, there are gaps where the attachments were. I drew in the missing sections.

And then painted them with a small paint brush using Setacolour Opaque Black.

They look fuzzy because this is a very close image, they don't look so fuzzy even when you are standing close to the work.

So, some translations:

Ethiopia

1960

Roma (Rome)

And the clue of the subject matter:

Abebe Bilika

If you know much about sports or Olympic history, you might know the occasion this work will be celebrating! Especially with the word 'running' which is above and the clue from yesterday and in the above photo about footprints.

But you will need to wait til Monday for more details!