Question by chink_prat16: What materials are required to practice chinese calligraphy?
I am an arts student i hear that practicing chinese calligraphy helps in improving strokes.I have been unable to find specific internet on the net and i dont want to pay….are there any specific brushes/pens that are used ..please help !!
Best answer:
Answer by Taomeister
Wow, it’s so rare to find people here interested in the Asian arts! As a fellow arts student, some suggestions:
Use bamboo brushes of varying size, depending on the size of the characters you want to write. Fine sable hair is a pretty good choice, but for larger brushes wolf hair is also found. Avoid synthetics like the plague, especially nylon brushes! They don’t hold the ink as well, and don’t streak in the spontaneously beautiful way natural brushes do.
You will also need traditional inks, using an ink stone and a rubbing surface (usually a stone resevoir that can be found in Chinatown shops). This method is closest to tradtional style, allowing you to create different levels of the ink’s darkness depending on how much you grink the ink stone with water on the stone tablet. You can get shades of gray to a deep rich black. Alternatively, you can use bottled Chinese / Japanese ink. I found some good resources to do these at Utrecht art supply, and Japanese kozo paper as well (essentially Chinese rice paper) which work very well.
The reason many people prefer the traditional papers and inks is because they don’t bleed so much if mixed right, and offer the most variability. You can use smooth watercolor paper as substitute if you must. Avoid the ones with grains because the grain will skew and bleed unevenly. Some people use watercolors (goache) black instead of the usual ink, and it would also work alright if you don’t want to invest in the ink. But absolutely essential is the bamboo natural hair brushes. Don’t use pens / oil or acrylic brushes.
When mixing the ink, avoid using too much water. It’s kind of hard to find the perfect balance – too wet and it bleeds too much or doesn’t give you the darkest black, too dry and you can’t get a consistent stroke and your brush gets prickly fast. It’s better to have your brush hold a lot of dark ink, and then blot the brush slightly on a rag or napkin or the side of your cup / dish to remove the excess ink on it than to have it too dry.
Oh! One last thing I forgot to mention. You don’t hold the brush the same way you hold a pencil / pen. You hold it upright so that your thumb points upward along its length, and your index and middle fingers then support the other side. The brush should point almost straight down, opposite the direction of the thumb. Most of your movements therefore should come from the wrist and forearm, not the fingers.
I hope that helps, maybe too much info to take at once haha. Good luck with that. I KNOW it helps you with brush technique because I’ve taken traditional ink painting and a bit of Chinese calligraphy and it really emphasizes brush technique. Best of luck!
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