How should I practice calligraphy every day? (Part 2) After analyzing the method of copying, in this issue we will continue from the previous chapter to talk about the method:
1. The order of posting
(1) Should we start with strokes?
As mentioned in the last issue, hard-pen calligraphy does not have so high requirements for strokes and is much simpler. So should we start practicing with strokes?
You can start practicing with strokes, but it's not necessary.
Because each character is composed of strokes, when you are practicing a single character and want to write it well, you have requirements for strokes. Therefore, when you are practicing single characters, you have already practiced strokes. .
For example, when we practice the character "Shen", we require you to write the character with a straight vertical stroke. Isn't this already practicing strokes?
But there is an advantage to practicing systematically from strokes, that is, it allows you to know what correct strokes and high-quality strokes should look like and how to complete them.
We always can't write well when practicing strokes at the beginning, and it's boring. Don't spend too much time on it. When we encounter difficult strokes during the practice of vocabulary, it's perfectly fine to go back and consolidate the practice of strokes. of.
Therefore, the practice of strokes can be carried out throughout the entire process of calligraphy practice, and continuous improvement is required. However, it is extremely inefficient to spend a lot of time practicing strokes in the early stage of drawing, and then when it comes to single characters, they still cannot work together. Combining single words to practice strokes is a more efficient method.
In the early stage, we chose some representative characters for better results, such as "十", "神", "中", "木", etc. These characters have the following characteristics:
The first sentence of "Ling Fei Sutra" is "The Five Emperors of Qiong Palace are thinking about the Dharma", so the first word is "Qiong". If we start practicing from this word, the difficulty can be imagined, and you can tell me, Which stroke practice is it more helpful for?
Starting from simple words is easier to master, which is in line with our principle of "step by step, easy first and then difficult".
The first character in Ouyang Xun's "Jiucheng Palace" is "九", and it is also the first character that many people write when they pick up a brush and write this book. But I often write and write without getting the point.
It's just because it's so irregular. How to control the angle of this one? How to determine the length and angle of the hook? Maybe the teacher can't explain it clearly to you. Even if he tells you a very precise angle, you can't write it down.
This kind of writing relies on feeling, relying on your increasingly improved aesthetics. Knowing how to arrange this stroke will look good, but it can only be understood in words.
Similar words include "Xu", "A", "this", etc.
3. Commonly used
What we are talking about is how to practice calligraphy in daily life, so the key point is to choose commonly used words, which is especially important for us to improve our daily writing.
It is precisely because you use it often that practice is effective and energetic.
Although some copybooks have 3,500 commonly used characters, you don’t use many of them at all. In the end, you practice calligraphy just for the sake of practicing calligraphy, and they are divorced from practicality.
More importantly, practicing common words will help you consolidate and improve.
For example, if you practiced the word "木" this morning and wrote about it in your homework in the afternoon, would you think about it and how to write it while practicing? Will you take a look at it after you finish writing it? That’s not what it says on the copybook, right?
But after you have practiced "Qiong" and "Zhai" for a day, it is still traditional or even variant, and finally it has some shape. After half a year, you have not written this character. Do you think it is efficient?
In the early stage, we will focus on these simple, regular, and commonly used characters, and later we can start writing some commonly used combined characters.
Don’t worry about how long you need to practice each character. Many characters are similar: single characters are components of many combined characters, and combined characters also have many similar rules. Choose some more representative ones to practice. That's it, such as left-right structure, up-down structure, "pin" structure, encircling structure, semi-enclosing structure, etc.
For a long, long period of time, single character practice was the main aspect, with some stroke practice interspersed in the early stage, and overall composition practice interspersed in the middle and late stages.
The practice of hard-pen composition is not complicated. Write a whole article every week to test yourself. The whole article in the early stage can be a copybook for practice. If you make a mistake or fail to write it well, write it down. Do not erase or repeat in the middle until the article is completed. , then compare it with the copybook after completion. At this time, copybooks with strokes and collections of words are not very useful. Copybooks with the entire content will be better.
When comparing copybooks, one is to see how the arrangement of the characters differs from your own, and what is the spacing between the characters? How about line spacing? From the whole to the part, a little bit of contrast.
At the same time, you can also test your vocabulary level and find your own shortcomings. Then slowly try to excerpt some paragraphs and poems, and then observe its layout and words yourself, and constantly revise them.
Strokes, structure, and composition are all part of calligraphy practice. You can start with strokes, but don't spend too much time on them. Single characters are the focus, stipples are polished in single character practice, and composition is used to test yourself every week.
In fact, whether your method of practicing calligraphy is correct or not depends on whether your method of writing is correct or not. Whether you succeed in practicing calligraphy or not is not complicated. It only depends on two things. One is to see whether you can persist. In fact, many people have been screened out. Most of the people I have met who want to practice calligraphy just think about it. When it comes to action, not many can persist for more than three months. The second is whether the method is correct. Of the 80% who can't persist, probably half of it is because the method is wrong and ineffective, so they can't persist, and the other half is because of laziness.
Okay, without further ado, let’s get straight to the method:
(1) Basic idea
The purpose of practicing calligraphy is to change the original bad writing habits, so how to change it? There must be a standard. Only by getting closer to that standard can we become better. Otherwise, there is no point in becoming worse. The standard is the copybook in our hands.
We use copybooks to keep the words we write close to the words on the copybook.
How to do it specifically?
Then you need to repeatedly observe, compare, find problems, then correct, observe again, compare again, find problems again, correct again, and so on. This is the basic method of posting
Do you think it is very simple, but it is such a simple thing, and very few people can persevere because it is very tiring. Many people did the same thing at the beginning, just to imitate, but found that even a single word could not describe the image, and after writing it, they found it even uglier, so they gave up.
At the beginning, we always encounter a lot of difficulties, and writing does not look like normal. However, through observation and comparison, I find that my vertical strokes are not straight. I can write straighter, which is also progress, right?
I found that my horizontal strokes were too slanted, so I wrote flatter. I found that I couldn't control the strokes well, so I tried to control them, but it still didn't work, so I kept practicing.
Anyone who persists despite being foolish will succeed, and I hope you will too!
What I mainly want to say is that post-writing is tiring and time-consuming, but if you can conscientiously stick to it for a year, your progress will definitely be obvious.
In fact, I can explain it clearly in one sentence, but you have to firmly believe that it is right, and you will not shrink back or doubt when you encounter difficulties, just persist. When you first start practicing calligraphy, there is nothing else, just to be as similar as possible, please If you don’t seek too much, you just keep fighting with it. In the end, it’s still not similar enough. Any progress is also a success.
Human attention is limited. When we concentrate on a certain detail, it is easy to lose control of the overall situation. On the contrary, when we grasp the overall situation, it is easy to neglect certain details.
In calligraphy practice, this principle is the same. In a word, the strokes are the details and the structure is the whole; in a work, the stipples and structure are the details and the composition is the whole.
Therefore, if you want good strokes, structure, and composition, you must switch between details and the whole at will.
Therefore, when copying words, the correct method is:
1. Let’s first observe the shape of the entire character, whether it is tall or flat, fat or thin, which part is smooth and which part is compact, so that we know it well, so that the placement of each stroke will not be too biased.
2. After you have a grasp of the overall shape of a single character, start writing the first stroke accordingly. Confirm the length, position, and angle of each stroke, and then focus on the details of the strokes. Finally, even the details of your strokes If it is not in place due to lack of skill, the entire glyph will not deviate too much, and it will be easier to correct it.
3. The details of the strokes determine the quality of the strokes. Pay attention first to those long strokes, which are usually the main strokes of a character. Even if they are not the main strokes, their impact on the entire character is not comparable to that of ordinary short strokes. A stroke usually consists of three stages: start, line and end. For long strokes, focus on stabilizing the line first, which is the main part of the stroke.
The word "backing" is essentially a temporary post, which can be regarded as a more advanced and more difficult temporary post. Because it is based on a certain foundation of copybooks, when we are familiar with a certain copybook to a certain extent, we can try "back copybook".
The so-called back copy means not looking at the copybook, but relying solely on one's own memory and feelings to reproduce a large section of the copybook's content, and then comparing and testing it.
There are several benefits to doing this.
First, you can well test the effect of your own writing and test whether the mastery of the glyph structure is really absorbed in the brain and heart.
The second is to be able to gradually cultivate one's own overall consciousness and have a self-observation and improvement in the rules and regulations.
Having said so much before, how should we write it?
Let’s take writing a long horizontal line as an example:
1. Generally speaking, the left is low and the right is high, but this left is low and the right is high, and it is not too exaggerated to cause loss of balance.
2. Stable writing style. A stroke, especially a long stroke, consists of three parts: start, line and end. The line of a long stroke is relatively long and is the main part of the entire stroke. If it is crooked, the entire stroke will naturally fail.
3. There is a downward movement when closing the pen, because with this downward movement, the "tilt" can finally be balanced, especially when doing the bottom horizontal stroke.
Let's take a look at how this "long horizontal" is done with a hard pen.
Start writing: Insert the paper diagonally, with an angle less than 45°, so that the transition from starting to writing is easier and more natural. The starting movement should be small rather than too large.
Stroke: Move smoothly to the right with a slight incline, just keep it as stable as possible. It would be better if you can lift the pen slightly to create a slight tapering effect. The angle of the strokes should not be too tilted. The overall horizontal angle mainly depends on the grasp of the strokes.
To close the pen: When you reach the end of the stroke, just press and close the pen diagonally downwards. In order to avoid a broken tail, you can slightly drag the pen in the direction of closing the pen, or you can also make a backstroke, provided that the movements are all correct. Be small.
Okay, that’s all. In the next issue, I’ll tell you what are the misunderstandings in calligraphy practice?
