GONG QI’S EIGHT TIPS IN PRACTICING CALLIGRAPHY
Abstract: A. Choose your copybook. It’s better to choose the copybook on your own. You may make the option among several copybooks and make comparisons until getting your favorite calligrapher and school for practicing. For regular script style, you may choose a copybook from “Jiuchenggong” of Xun Ouyang , “Duobaota”of Zhenqing Yan or “Xuanmita” of Gongquan Liu. On the contrary, if you practice with a copybook assigned by the other or the demonstration from your tutor, you are likely to find the copybook is out of interest or even get annoyed during the practice.
Suggested keywords: Gong Qi, calligraphy
A.Choose your copybook.
It’s better to choose the copybook on your own. You may make the option among several copybooks and make comparisons until getting your favorite calligrapher and school for practicing. For regular script style, you may choose a copybook from “Jiuchenggong” of Xun Ouyang , “Duobaota”of Zhenqing Yan or “Xuanmita” of Gongquan Liu. On the contrary, if you practice with a copybook assigned by the other or the demonstration from your tutor, you are likely to find the copybook is out of interest or even get annoyed during the practice. So choose the most suitable but not many copybook for yourself by giving up the other options.
B. Structure is the key element.
Chinese calligraphy are good-looking, beautiful and artistic, primarily because of the pen movement and form of Chinese character. Learning Structure is the first step to go in practicing calligraphy. You should focus your mind on the position of strokes and carefully arrange their direction and angle, the space and density between strokes and so on. The result can’t be relied on any vivid or varied stroke alone. Once the position, angle, space and all elements of each stroke are on the right track and precise, you will have a good-looking character on the paper. The overall appearance of a character is crucial in calligraphy, so beware of the proportions of tight and loose parts in the structure (tight top and loose bottom, tight left and loose right, small top and big bottom, narrow top and broad bottom, small left and big right, narrow left and broad right).
C. Hold the pen like chopsticks.
You should hold the pen like using chopsticks in picking up the dishes. This note has been proved as a simple and scientific truth according to much practices. Don’t indulge in traditional holding positions that are handed over for generations, you should be dare to break false rules of holding positions. Never hold the pen firmly, or it will be not as much flexible in turning and writing and bound to produce rigid strokes, poor control of force and rapid and finally a unnatural and inflexible character. It’s better to pay more attention to the bending and straight track of each stroke as well as their proportion and position aside from the forms and variation of the strokes.
D. Define a circle before you start
Before resting the pen against paper, define a circle in the air to include an area for the character in your vision. If the strokes are always kept within the area, that means your holding position, wrist lifting or elbow hanging are adequate and natural enough. It’s easy to make a small circle for small character of regular script only by resting your wrist against the paper. However, for a big character, you have to lift your wrist and elbow to complete an exact big circle. Therefore, it depends on the character size but not any specified rule to figure out the holding position, wrist lifting and elbow hanging in writing.
E. Imitation and Scanning
The beginner can use a copybook to do imitation over a tracing paper or thin film (add a few detergent or soap into the ink if you apply a film). There are two approaches in imitation. The first one is using a Chinese brush to write on the paper covered on copybook directly. The other is starting from the skeleton of each stroke with a single-line pen (such as pencil, ballpoint pen or fountain pen), then completing the margin along the skeleton afterwards, as referred to “indirect writing”.
The ancient Chinese has pointed out the benefit of imitation in the saying “Imitation is an easy way to master position.” Imitation is a process to comprehend what is“precise”position while learn through the subtle changes in dot, sketch, space and structure, to checkout the correctness of structure and pen movement in daily practice in case of any errors and to make correction in case of need.
F. Practice a few characters a day
Don’t practice too much a day. The suggestion is to write a few characters, generally four or five words and pick up one of them to learn by heart in a day. It is quiet similar to the learning of foreign language or their words-don’t take on too much in one go. In that case, if you keep practicing for one year, the harvest is going to be 300 characters in the year around. You will get a very solid foundation over the thousand characters after three years. Some people practice very hard and work on 100 characters in a day but still feel unsatisfied to the equivalent of a thousand in ten days. Some others copy the word after word in copybook without any complaint, all along from morning to evening. However, you can never get hold of calligraphy if you do massive exercises and practice without thinking.
G. Cross practice.
Practicing Calligraphy is not the same thing as building a house since the latter is always started with a solid foundation. The cross practice of running script in routine exercise of regular script is more helpful to comprehend the relation between strokes. “Writing regular script with the mind of running script will not produce rigid stroke or character”, refers to the way to avoid zombie strokes without any connections to each other. “Writing running script with the mind of regular script will not produce improper position or density”, means that the general shape of running script, the distance of and space between strokes shall basically meet the rule of regular script, otherwise the improper arrangement is not going to create a beautiful character. For unidentifiable or messy running scripts especially cursive scripts, they are not in the range of calligraphy art any more.
H. Put it up on the wall.
Putting up a work on the wall and stepping back from the wall, you will have a clear and full view of the work in the distance. This is an easy approach to examine the merits and demerits, the size and proportion of the context, inscription and seal, the composition and arrangement, the coordination and natural perception in the work. If your works are excellent even on a wall, then it’s assured that you have reached a high level in calligraphy.