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How to start learning Chinese (or Japanese) Calligraphy v 2.0

Changelogs: rewrite a lot of stuff

A short primer on what you need to buy and how to start doing Chinese calligraphy as a long-term hobby.

Some prior notes

  • If you can find a teacher, a teacher is going to be better than any advice I can give here.
  • More importantly than anything else I can say here: it's important to enjoy yourself. Calligraphy is a long journey and a long commitment, and burnout is a very real thing.

On starting

  • It's tempting to start by trying to write cursive. But foundations are important, so it's best to focus on learning to write write standard script (楷書). Personally I feel like standard script is a bit of an underappreciated art -- it can actually be really interesting, especially comparing different calligrapher's works. Of course, it's ok to try more fancy stuff once in a while, but foundation is important. (Some teachers also start with clerical script. If that interests you more, maybe that's a good option too.)
  • Write (relatively) large characters (about 10cm/4in, but doesn't have to be that precise). It's just a lot easier to control the brush for larger movements than smaller ones.
  • Write slowly. It's ok if your hand shakes and you lose control of the brush; the solution to this isn't to write fast but to learn to control the brush better, and the only way to practice this is to try to go slower.
  • Calligraphy is as much about the reading (to understand how calligraphers proportion their work) as it is about the writing. Find calligraphy examples you really like and study them.

Brushes

  • Get a decent (not necessarily expensive) brush. Often cheap brushes are made of nylon, which doesn't absorb water/ink well, so it makes a real difference here. Might be best to find a shop (in the local Chinatown?)
  • Animal hair brushes: typically brushes are made of weasel (often translated as wolf) hair 狼毫 (stiff) or goat hair 羊毫 (soft), or some combination of the two. Sometimes other animal hairs are used.
  • Conventional wisdom: Weasel hair is better for beginning as stiff brushes are easier to control. IMO doesn't matter two much though, might be best to ask the shop yourself.

Holding a brush

  • See this. I'd recommend the two finger hold (soukouhou) for most large writing as it provides more stability.
  • For large writing lift your elbow off the table to write (it takes some practice), and write mostly with your shoulder.

Caring for a brush

  • For first time use, soak the entire brush for a while (half an hour-ish?) to remove the glue holding the brush hair together.
  • Learn to wash a brush (there are great vids online).
  • If you have a good place to hang brushes, you should hang them to dry and keep. When transporting brushes, traditionally you store them in a bamboo roll

Brush pens

I don't really like most brush pens for calligraphy use. In any case, my personal recommendations:

  • Pentel brush pens (XFL2L) are pretty good
  • Tombow Fudenosuke pens don't feel like a brush at all, but they write pretty well in my experience
  • Anything with a felt tip (copics, tombow dual brush, etc) are not worth using

Ink

  • Get ink specifically for calligraphy (or Chinese painting) use. Other inks can damage a brush.
  • A lot of inks are sold drier than they should be, and you should probably dilute them (with as much as an equal part of water). If your brush feels stiff, the ink needs more water. If the ink is grey, it's too dilute.
  • Grinding ink seems cool, but it's really quite frustrating and takes a long time. Strongly recommend starting with bottled ink and learning to grind ink later (there are vids out there if you want to learn how to grind ink).
  • I ink the entire brush before writing, and make sure the brush fully absorbs the ink. This does make the brush harder to wash though.
  • If the ink feathers and spreads, it's more often than not the fault of your brush control more than a fault of the ink. Try to make sure you extract excess ink from the brush (by shaping the tip into a point) and maintain this tip during your strokes (so ink doesn't spill out too fast.

Paper

  • If you're using a brush pen, any paper is fine
  • If you're using an actual brush, get good calligraphy paper (you can buy this online).
  • Handmade papers have a smooth and a rough side; write on the smooth side.
  • Don't write on newspaper as it may damage the brush.
  • For large papers, you can partition the space by folding the paper into squares to help you maintain consistent spacing (but not for cursive; character heights in cursive can be very inconsistent).

Other stuff

Get a container for ink. Make sure it's something you're not gonna use elsewhere, as ink stains are really hard to wash.

Get a piece of felt (I bought mine from daiso) and put it under your paper before you write.

Try to find a quiet place to write; do whatever rituals you need to to focus. It's hard to concentrate on writing if you have many distractions (internally or externally).

Where do I start learning?

Traditionally Chinese calligraphy is learnt through copying an exemplar. I like Ouyang Xun's (歐陽詢) works as a starting point. I can't emphasize this enough, but please don't copy from a computer font. Computer fonts have different design than calligraphy styles, and even the more calligraphic-styled ones can be very far from what counts as good calligraphy.

If you understand Mandarin, I really like this guy's youtube channel. Even if you don't, I think his videos in this playlist are still useful in showing how basic strokes are done. He has many videos demonstrating how to write in the style of famous calligraphers, and he explains quite well.

If not, some people in the English-Japanese discord server really like Takumi, perhaps you'd want to start with his hiragana video?

Other resources:

  • shufazidian is a good resource for looking up Chinese characters.
  • These two pdf documents by the same guy above, showing the basics of proportioning characters
  • maybe more to come later idk
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