ROYAL OAK, Mich. — Calligrapher Vicki Corwin has a hand in many of life’s most important moments. Her calligraphy has graced things such as diplomas and thousands of wedding invitations, place-cards at million-dollar parties and once even a love letter.

But with computer fonts mimicking the finest scripts, is there really a place for those who still use the old, slow skill of pen and ink?

Actually, yes.

Calligraphy, the skill of beautiful handwriting, is back in style. It is part of society’s fascination with handmade things in a high-tech world.

“The number of people who are eager for this type of learning is just phenomenal. It is really catching fire. The pendulum is swinging,” said Corwin, who learned calligraphy 31 years ago and has worked full time as a calligrapher since 2002.

The reason, she said, is that a computer script, which can perfectly replicate itself a thousand times on a thousand wedding envelopes, just does not have the same look as something handwritten, with its slight differences made by the artist’s scratching nib across the paper.

There’s a warmth to calligraphy that is missing from machine-generated work.

Artist’s hand

Working at a broad, slightly slanted art table that takes up most of her living room, she chooses her pen and ink, working with the indirect light streaming in the front windows and a white desk lamp.

In her drawer just to the right of her chair are her inks in little pots, each with a white lid: Ziller Midnight Blue, Cardinal Red, Wild Viola Violet, Sweetgrass Green, Buffalo Brown, Northwind White. She also uses walnut inks, Chinese soot inks and gouache, a watercolor type of paint she can custom mix for odd colors a bride may request, like peach.

Perched high on the shelves above her desk are old fashioned ink pots with quill pens. They are just decorative. Her work is done with something called a pointed pen split nib. The nib of the pen is off to the left of the handle. That makes her hand less tired over time.

As she works, her small gray cat Sweet Pea usually curls up in a small bed next to her on the desk.

“She is my assistant; she greets the clients,” said Corwin.

And there is a lot of work to do.

Sign here

Sometimes, desperate people will show up at her door, asking her to address one single envelope.

“One woman said, I’ll pay you anything you want if you address an envelope for me,” Corwin said. “I said, ‘what is it?’ She was sending her résumé to Kate Spade (fashion house) in New York. So I found a pink business envelope and addressed it for her. She paid me $20, and I handed it back to her and said ‘good luck.’”

Once, she was the alter-ego of a young man in love.

“A young man was really trying to impress this gal, so he asked me to write a love letter,” she said. “He typed it and e-mailed it to me, and I transcribed it onto the stationery, and it worked! He got the girl.”

Another time, she transcribed into script an entire 535-word wedding vow. A husband hired her to create it for his wife as a gift for their one-year anniversary. “It was a little bit private, but it was cool,” she said.

Corwin’s sophisticated work finds its way onto poems, proclamations, birth certificates, diplomas, Christmas cards and art mats. She does 60 to 80 diplomas a year for Sacred Heart Seminary graduates in Detroit.

She’s even been hired by New York party planners to attend parties as an emergency place-card writer.

“They bring me on-site so I can make last minute changes, say, if someone’s wife isn’t coming I can make a new place-card,” she said. “They put me in a little closet, and they give me cards, and I bring my ink to match, and I sit there and just make changes.”

Mostly, though, she does the calligraphy addresses on wedding invitations. She does most of them in what’s called “bride’s hand,” traditional copperplate script, but sometimes brides choose something less formal and more contemporary. She has done it for weddings as large as 400 people.

She charges $2.35 per envelope.

“It doesn’t take me that long,” she said. “I can write about 40 envelopes a day and maintain quality and spelling. You figure 40 a day, so I can do a 400-piece order in 10 days.”

How can she keep doing it without her hand tiring? She wears a soft wrist cast every night to protect against carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. She takes breaks. She takes her time. “I try to do 8 at a time, then I stop. Then I do 8 more. I try not to do more than 24 at a time.”

Her writing is so graceful that it seems effortless.

That is not true. It is due to years of practice.

In the script

Corwin comes from a family of artists. Both her mother and great-grandfather were painters. Although Corwin did not inherit the painting talent, she loved to doodle and write words on a page as a young child growing up in Cleveland. But she never thought to make a career of it.

At 20, she moved to Michigan. She married Doug Emig 33 years ago and moved to Royal Oak. Over the years, her world has expanded to include 9 nieces, 1 nephew and 2 cats.

Her first career was executive secretary, and she did that for 14 years. Then she opened a business that supplied and maintained plants for office buildings, and that lasted 13 years.

But her life changed in 1985 when a teacher friend needed students for a calligraphy class at Southfield Community Ed and asked Corwin to please sign up.

“She was teaching italic, and we used a chisel nib, and I just fell in love with it,” she said. “So I took the next class, and the next class, and learned the historic alphabets: gothic, uncial, italic and the modern historics like Carolingian.

“I found that the key to the whole thing was practice. You build up your muscles and your muscle memory.”

In 2001, she was asked by Tiffany’s at Troy’s Somerset Mall to be a resident calligrapher working with brides. She learned to do the formal script called copperplate most used on wedding invitations.

The handwriting was on the wall. Calligraphy was her new career.