Ancient Chinese Calligraphy by Stephanie

Calligraphy is understood in China as art or writing. Chinese writing began 6,000 years ago. A character stood for a thing or the idea of the thing. When calligraphy first began, the writing looked like symbols for a whole word. The first writing was pictures of figures. For example "dog" is a picture of a dog. Characters usually have more than one meaning. There are some characters that Chinese people use a lot like "fu," which means good luck.

Scripts Chinese scripts are divided into five groups: the seal characters, the running hand, the official script, the regular script, and the cursive hand. The seal character was the earliest form of writing. The official script was very complicated to read and write. Cheng Miao, a prison warden, changed the curly strokes into straight ones so it would be easier to read and write. The regular script had to be known to every calligrapher so they could learn to write the other types of writing. The cursive hand is used to make rough drafts. Zhang Xu was one of the best cursive handwriters. They say that he had to be drunk so he could write and make all the curling on the paper and make it good. The running hand is in the middle of cursive and regular scripts. If you did it fast it looked like the cursive writing but if you did it very carefully it looked like the regular scripts. Brushes For Chinese Calligraphy you always have to use a brush. Most of the brushes have white goat's hair, black rabbit's hair, or yellow weasel's hair. Those are the three major types of hair used in the brushes. They also classify brushes into three other groups. The groups are classified by the tip of the brush. The brushes are "hard", "soft", or "both". The stick of the brush is sometimes made out of bamboo wood.

Writing Surfaces
You could write on painted pottery, inscriptions, oracle bones, bamboo slips, and silk. Silk was a good material to write on because you could cut it in many different shapes. It was lighter to carry and could also be folded. The most valuable find of ancient silk writing was in 1973. It was a form made of 30 odd pieces of silk that had more than 120,000 characters drawn upon it. Wuxingzhan found a piece of silk that had the planets Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and Saturn drawn on it. They found another one of a map drawn on silk.

Oracle bones with writing on them were discovered in 1899. It was proof that Chinese writing was already highly developed in 1200 B.C. After the oracle bones with writing they found the bronze inscriptions. The writing was similar to that of the oracle bones.

Color
Color in Chinese paintings and calligraphy came from the ink stone. The ink stone is the most important of the four treasures for calligraphy which are writing brush, ink-stick, paper and ink stone. It is important because they get all the color from the ink stone.

Seal Characters

Official Script

Regular Script

Cursive Hand

Running Hand

Bibliography

www.chinavista.com/experience/calligraphy/
www.logoi.com /notes/Chinese_origins.html