C17: Day 22 – Qian

January 22, 2017

Toady’s number, qian, is 1,000. The challenge with qian is not the strokes but the proportions. Getting them right is hard.

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C17: Day 21 – Bai

January 21, 2017

Today I focused on the number 100, bai. If there’s an improvement, it’s in the fact that this took me a lot less time than previous pages.

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C17: Day 20 – Qi and Jiu

January 20, 2017

I found a new video! This one goes through all the numbers from one to 10, and 100 and 1,000. This teacher doesn’t do the little upflicks at the end of the curvy bit, but with a closer look at how the shapes are formed I think I’ve done a better job today. This is the number […]

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C17: Day 19 – Six to ten

January 19, 2017

Well, that was harder than expected! I thought I was getting into a flow, but today there were new shapes to form that I didn’t manage very well at all. Numbers seven and nine are especially hard. That curve and upward sweep is really difficult, and it’s not a shape I’ve practiced before. I think […]

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C17: Day 18 – One to five

January 18, 2017

I really enjoyed today’s calligraphy! These are the numbers 1 to 5, and I started top right and worked downwards, which just happens to be one of the directions that Chinese writing can be written in, called zongpai. I’m following the instructions on this worksheet from MIT (pdf), and tomorrow will do numerals from six to 10. […]

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C17: Day 17 – My first Chinese character!

January 17, 2017

Today, I drew my very first proper Chinese character! The character is “yong” which means “forever” or “permanence”. It contains all the basic strokes that I’ve been practicing, so it’s a good one to start with. A usual, it’s a bit scrappy and my dot, or “dian” is fricken awful. But still, I think anyone capable […]

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C17: Day 16 – Gou

January 16, 2017

Gou! A whole page of the bottom bit of a downstroke. Tomorrow, I’ll join all them up together into ‘yong’.

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C17: Day 15 – Pie

January 15, 2017

Today is a day for a nice, lovely pie! As ever, the challenge is creating a nice, smooth start to the stroke, rather than a smooth end, which is relatively easy. But getting the right shape for the start (top right) without it going all ragged is really hard. However, this video seems to show that […]

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C17: Day 14 – Learning the names

January 14, 2017

Now I’ve finished the second tutorial video, I’ve moved on to a diagram of the strokes from Wikipedia, that source of infinite knowledge.   I have so far done héng (Days 4, 5, 8), shù  (Day 10), dian (Day 11), wan (Day 12) and nà (Day 13), so today is tí. It’s really hard to […]

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C17: Day 13 – Diagonal lines

January 13, 2017

Today’s exercise is a downward diagonal stroke to the right, and I have to say that I think I’m improving! Many of these look far closer to how they should look than I was anticipating. Still some detailed control to develop, but definite improvement!

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C17: Day 12 – The real Day 12

January 12, 2017

Slightly curvy down strokes today, along with a few extras because I had a little ink left. I was right about needing the pen ink to be a little thicker. It didn’t take much, but it made a difference!

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C17: Day 11 – Poxy dots

January 11, 2017

So this week, we’re mainly going to be ignoring the fact that I got a day ahead of myself this evening, and we’re also going to ignore just how crap my dots are. I found the explanation of the stroke movements in the video really confusing – the diagram and explanation were at odds with the […]

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C17: Day 10 – Vertical lines

January 10, 2017

Yesterday I came to the end of the exercises from the previous video, so I found a new one: I also decided to use some black pen ink instead of spending ages grinding the solid ink that came with the set, which saved me about 15 minutes (the whole thing’s only supposed to take 15 minutes!). The […]

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C17: Day 9 – Lines with rounded ends

January 9, 2017

More lines! This time, lines with rounded ends. Slightly easier than the other lines, not that these are as lovely and smooth as they ought to be, but gotta start somewhere. Big error today was putting too much water in the grinding plate and after 15 minutes of grinding still having watery, crappy ink. That’s […]

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C17: Day 8 – Lines! Lots of lines!

January 8, 2017

Today’s lines are much improved on previous attempts and I’m bordering on almost pleased with them! I started with the small brush and then took a leap and tried the bigger brush that came with the kit again. It behaved better now that I know I need to load it up with more ink. Still […]

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