1. Posture: Buckle your chin slightly, your wrist should be strong but not stiff, and you should put a little more force between your fingers and the pen.
2. Tools: Look for a relatively soft wolf hair. You need to feel the elasticity of the pen under your hand. Real wolf hair is very soft. Although it is soft, the waist of the pen is required to be strong so that it can stand up on its own if it falls. If you are lucky, find some old pens from ten or twenty years ago. In terms of paper, you can look for longer-lasting rice paper as creative paper. As long as money permits, the older the paper, the better.
3. Post writing: Try to treat running script as regular script and regular script as running script. You must be able to analyze by yourself how many beats there are in a single word, and the angle and speed of each beat. An engraving or rubbing can be used as a supplement to the ink version, but the ink version should still be the main one. The scope of copying can also extend beyond the Tang Dynasty, but learning from things after the Ming Dynasty is absolutely not allowed!
4. Amount of practice: It is best to have two hours a day, nearly a thousand in running script and nearly five hundred in regular script. At this time, not only the overall speed is required, but also the speed of individual strokes is required to increase. It is best to control each word between 6-10 seconds.
Don't rush to create, take your time, it will take three years.
Wrist hanging is a must! Please insist, you cannot reach wrist level without hanging your wrists. In fact, don’t be nervous, you can use chopsticks and a pen, and think carefully about how to pick up dumplings. You can start with Zhiyong's Thousand-Character Essay, which requires an ink pad. The characters can be slightly larger, because our tools can't keep up.
Dysjian believes that before the Qin Dynasty, hard pens were used for writing. This is a misinformation. Chinese people have always used brushes to write. Many calligraphy brushes from the Warring States Period have been unearthed, and ink and jade calligraphy existed as early as the Shang Dynasty. The "迿" at the bottom of the pen was called "bi" in ancient times. It is the sound side of the pen, not the meaning of reed. Mingyin's explanation of the sword of the sword is correct.
It doesn’t matter whether the writing is good or not, but if you don’t write more and more, you will become more troubled or more manic, that is because the method is wrong. There is also a solution, which is to speed up the writing a little bit. When the speed is increased, the words will not be too scattered. At the same time, pay attention to the feeling of the wrist and ignore the criticism of the head during the writing process. It doesn't matter if the writing is not good or bad, but the writing movement must be natural to the body. If Jiucheng Palace has not entered the country for a long time, can we take a step back for the time being and start with Duke Yu Gong?
Jiucheng Palace has very high requirements for the use of pens and lettering. Often, the copying is acceptable, but it is difficult to use it freely during actual creation. Although it is a common problem to be out of touch with trauma, it is often more obvious when studying Jiucheng Palace. If a hard attack fails, you might as well encircle and annihilate them in a roundabout way. Even if it is difficult to conquer in the end, you may still gain something along the way.
Let’s focus on answering a few questions:
1. How do we know how big the original text is?
Answer: The height of paper before the Ming Dynasty was about 26 centimeters, which is about the same height as one of our sixteen-page magazines. Therefore, most of the copybooks we print now are about the same size as the originals.
2. Which version of copybook is better to use?
Answer: If you have a lot of money, buy the one from Erxuan Society, followed by the set of thick cardboard covers from Xiling Seal Society, and the most common one is the one from Jilin Photography Publishing House Sun Baowen.
3. Is it possible to learn "Jiucheng Palace" if it is so difficult?
Answer: It is best to learn Ouyang Xun's running script and other inscriptions before writing "Jiucheng Palace".
4. What paper do you use for practice?
Answer: For handmade raw edge paper, it is best not to use newspaper.
5. What should I do if it is slow to enter the state?
Answer: To force yourself to increase your writing speed, you might as well practice writing strokes and radicals quickly as a warm-up.
When writing, you must consciously tilt the penholder at a certain angle. This angle will continuously change direction as the pen is moved. But it’s not like the popular calligraphy style of writing across the pen! The inclination angle of the penholder is mainly formed by the inward and outward inclination of the wrist. Do not use your fingers and shoulders to operate it.
The frame can be copied, but the brushwork can only be guessed at. Since you have to guess the strokes, of course it is easier to start with ink marks. If you are unwilling to start with ink and insist on learning classical calligraphy, then I recommend a strong medicine for you - write on the facade, stand the paper up and stick it to the wall or wooden board, and then write while hanging in the air. It’s definitely not going to work at first, but if you persevere, you’ll be rewarded, believe it or not.
Let’s talk about some theoretical issues:
1. "You only need one ladle of water for three thousand dollars" said: "Our calligraphy teacher teaches you to push the pen, not drag it. I have learned this." A very important point is that writing should be like sweeping the floor rather than dragging it. Mopping the floor, congratulations on meeting a good teacher.
But we should also refine it: Which part should be used to push the pen? That is, where is the source of force? Nowadays, beginners are mostly taught to exert force from their arms and keep their wrists relatively fixed, because they need to write large characters. But the consequence of doing so is that the writing speed cannot be increased and the force cannot be exerted clearly. Therefore, we might as well change the term "push and push" into another form, and use "translation" and "circle rotation" to distinguish the two ways of writing.
The so-called translation refers to exerting force parallel to the paper, which is what Teacher Weishui Sanqian calls dragging. It is the most undesirable way to exert force. The circle of "Yuanzhuan" is a spherical surface that forms a vertical plane with the paper surface, and the center of the circle is the wrist. Those who pay attention to classical calligraphy, please ponder here!
2. Scattered objects and official tablets raise the issue of disconnection between practice and creation, which should really attract our attention: Why can’t the tablets and inscriptions we study become elements of creation? This is a big problem that many graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts have not solved. But the solution is actually not complicated. Just write faster when practicing. Don't draw the glyphs slowly.
But why do so many people fall into this trap? First of all, I am too obsessed with images, and I always think that writing must be similar. In fact, the key is to see whether I can grasp the trajectory of the ancients' writing. The trajectory of ancient people's pen movements is three-dimensional, and it is not easy to grasp it. It requires constant speculation, practice, verification, etc. Today's people like to do physical work and don't like to use their brains, so they can't master penmanship and work as photocopiers. Secondly, there is too much emphasis on visual effects and neglect of physical feelings. Especially those who have received training in Western art, they can't wait to find the precise coordinates of each stroke. Most of the mistakes in modern calligraphy lie in catering to the Western habit of focusing on visual impact while ignoring one's own physical and mental feelings. There are also some wild fox Zens that mainly advocate the character of mind and are scrawled in random ways, which I cannot agree with. The nature of the mind is too sublime, let’s not worry about it for the moment, find the right feeling in the body first and then talk about other things!
3. The problem of fast pen movement and stroke quality may seem like a contradiction, but they are actually a pair of good friends. Modern people are accustomed to taking their time in tracing words. Once the speed is increased, they will immediately lose their shape. In fact, since the pavilion style flourished in the late Qing Dynasty, this shortcoming has begun to occur. It is always believed that characters written slowly are better than those written quickly. In fact, it's just the opposite. Without a certain speed as a foundation, the quality of strokes cannot be too high.
The key is how this speed is formed? I have seen several contemporary cursive calligraphy masters who can write very quickly, but the quality of their strokes is not satisfactory. In the Tang Dynasty, cursive calligraphers wrote extremely fast, and their stipples were extremely precise. What's the difference? The way of exerting force is just different. This is just like how modern people use muscles to punch, and ancient people use sinews to punch. Both are faster, but the effects are completely different. Speed is not everything, and nothing is impossible without speed. This speed is not formed by running up, but by the sudden force of the wrist.
