Chinese calligraphy is the artistic writing of symbols and characters that form the ancient language. The characters are written, or rather painted, with a hard-haired brush onto Xuan paper. Some single characters can take as many as 17 accurately executed brushstrokes to write. There are strict rules in calligraphy and strict techniques that every beginner learns, just like in any serious discipline. The results, though, are beautiful.
Holding the Brush
The technique for holding the calligraphy brush is a fundamental skill to master. The angles of your strokes are extremely important to control as you may inadvertently change the meaning of your character by changing the angle or thickness of a stroke. This kind of precision requires up to five fingers to be able to manipulate the brush. Posture is utterly important. Keeping your back straight and feet shoulder-width apart with the brush as vertical as possible over the paper is the correct way to master this traditional art.
Script Variations
There are five major scripts in Chinese calligraphy. Seal script is the original ancient Chinese script and is comprised of combinations of one stroke in any given direction. Clerical scripts use four major strokes; horizontal, vertical, left-falling and right-falling. Emphasis here falls on the contrasting thickness and darkness of the strokes. "Running" or cursive style script is a derivative of the clerical style and requires clerical training to learn. "Walking" or semi-cursive script is the most common today. It offers more freedom in terms of inaccurate execution of characters. Regular script embodies both clerical and semi-cursive scripts and has eight strokes in its style.
Zang Feng, Lu Feng, Zhuang Feng, Zhe Feng, Zhong Feng and Ce Feng
The word "feng" refers to the transparent tip of the brush, which must always remain hard and straight and never be bent out of shape. The words appearing before "feng" refer to the different ways the tip of the brush begins and ends a stroke. Each way has a particular significance that when truly understood the calligrapher can use in much the same way a poet might use the particular form of poetry that would express the content of his poem best. These are the literary techniques of Chinese calligraphy.
Hanging Arm Technique
Hanging arm technique is the technique of writing or painting characters without any part of your arm, hand or wrist touching the paper. It is said to be the rawest and most expressive form because the characters written with this technique tend to be big and bold. Hanging arm technique is not always the best technique to use when you want to concentrate on smaller more detailed characters. For this, a three-finger grip and a smaller brush or a scratch-nib would be more effective.
