About artistic calligraphy.

Art characters (Pinyin: měi shù zì) are characters that have been processed, beautified and decorated. In other words, it is a kind of writing art that uses decorative techniques to beautify words, and it is a practical font processed by art. The fonts are neat, eye-catching, beautiful and easy to read. They are an indispensable tool for publicity and education, such as banners, blackboards, posters, venue layouts, exhibitions, product packaging and decoration, and various advertisements, newspapers, magazines and books. No matter how good the decoration is, artistic calligraphy is indispensable.

Types of artistic calligraphy

1. From the perspective of country

It can be divided into Chinese artistic calligraphy and foreign artistic calligraphy.

2. In terms of use, it can be divided into printing, book binding, environmental decoration, blackboard newspapers, wall newspapers, commercial art, advertising, trademarks, etc.

3. In terms of form,

can be divided into two-dimensional art calligraphy and three-dimensional art calligraphy; or realistic art calligraphy and freehand art calligraphy.

4. From the perspective of fonts,

it can be divided into three categories: Song font, Hei font, and variant.

The development process of artistic calligraphy

In order for people to pay attention to artistic calligraphy and understand artistic calligraphy, it is necessary to understand Chinese characters and the origins of Chinese characters and artistic calligraphy. On the basis of language, human beings produced writing. What are words? Words are symbols used to record language. Chinese characters are symbols that record Chinese language. It has gone through several stages of evolution, including oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, large seal script, small seal script, official script, regular script, cursive script, and running script.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions

The earliest "Oracle Bone Inscriptions" from the Shang Dynasty were discovered in Anyang, Henan Province in 1899 on tortoise shells and animal bones. It has a history of more than 3,000 years. It is both a pictographic character and , which is also a phonetic word. It can be seen from this that it originated from pictures and had a long history of development before the Shang Dynasty. "Bronze Inscriptions" are characters cast on bronze vessels, and the two are collectively called "Jia Bronze Inscriptions." Among them, some words are the same as pictures. We call them pictographs, which are very vivid. For example, sun, moon, mountains, water, grass, trees, fish, birds (demonstration omitted). (The writing of ancient Western countries such as Egypt and Greece also developed from "picture writing - the era of uppercase letters - the era of lowercase letters". For example, A is developed from a cow head, B is developed from a yard, and K It is developed from grass blades, O is developed from eyes, and R is developed from human heads.

Shigu inscriptions

Later, Chinese writing experienced "Shigu inscriptions" (texts engraved on stone drums), which belong to the Zhou Dynasty. Later, the ancient calligraphy books circulated in the Han Dynasty and the characters carved on the walls were all ancient characters, collectively called "big seal script". Compared with the original oracle bone inscriptions, the development of large seal scripts is firstly linear, even and soft, concise and vivid; secondly, it is standardized, with the glyphs becoming neater and gradually deviating from the original shape of the picture, laying the foundation for square characters.

Xiaozhuan

After Qin Shihuang unified the country, he abolished the characters that were not unified with the Qin script. After Li Si and others collected, organized and simplified, a unified character - Xiaozhuan was produced. . Compared with college fonts, Xiaozhuan has a simplified shape, and has perfected lines and standardization. It is almost completely separated from pictorial characters. It looks neat, coordinated, and very beautiful. It is basically a rectangular block font. (Demonstration omitted) Small seal script has improved over larger seal script, but it also has its shortcomings, that is, it is inconvenient to carve with a knife and write with a pen. Therefore, almost at the same time, a kind of writing called official script, which was stretched to both sides and became a flat square, came into being. Ancient official script is the transitional font from Xiaozhuan to modern official script, and it is also a bridge for the transition from ancient characters to modern characters. Its characteristic is to transform the uniform lines of small seal characters with equal thickness into straight and angular strokes such as horizontal, straight, dot, left, pick, nip, and hook. This makes writing with a pen much more convenient. For example, the character "田" is written in Xiaozhuan, with a circle on the outside and a cross on the inside. It is difficult to write a circle, but it would be much easier to write the character "田" in ancient official script if it was straight and square. The emergence of official script also gave up the pictographic characters drawn in small seal script according to the actual objects, which transformed the "pictographic and meaning" characters before the Qin Dynasty into the characters of "symbolizing both meaning and pronunciation", and began to shape the following two characters. Thousand-year-old Chinese character form. "Ancient Li" developed into the Han Dynasty. On the basis of being straight and angular, "Modern Li" was formed that was fair, beautiful, and had a wave of momentum. Compared with the ancient Li, it took full advantage of the characteristics of brush writing and formed a more mature form. Beautiful font.

Because her two strokes are scattered to both sides, like the character "eight", it is also called "eight points book" (Wang Cizhong of the Eastern Han Dynasty is more famous).

Zhengshu and regular script

Zhenshu is also called Zhengshu and regular script. It began to sprout in the Western Han Dynasty, was immature in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and became popular after the Wei Dynasty. Zhenshu evolved directly from Jinli. There is not much difference in the physical structure, but the way of using the brush is different: Jinli's strokes are wave-like, while Zhenshu's strokes are smooth; Jinli's body structure is straight and square, with an eight-eight-shaped flat shape. Square, while Zhenshu is a Yong-shaped square; today's Li characters are expanding outwards, while Zhenshu is concentrated inward, forming today's Chinese character shape. Several calligraphers during the Three Kingdoms period still had the style of official script. Later, Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi, the calligraphers of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, completely got rid of the style of official script.

Printed fonts

In the Tang and Song Dynasties, the economy developed and a "golden age" appeared in writing. Especially in the middle of the eleventh century, Bi Sheng invented "printing" (movable type printing) and was called the "Mother of Civilization". Buddhist scriptures, almanacs and other printed matter were very popular at that time, and were later introduced to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, Iran, Egypt and Europe. After the invention of printing, the engraving knife used for lettering had a profound impact on the shape of Chinese characters, resulting in a preliminary printing font that was "light horizontally and heavy vertically, eye-catching in reading". The "square and uniform structure" printing fonts commonly used in woodblock printing during the Northern Song Dynasty were called "Song style characters". At that time, there were two types of fonts carved: fat and thin: fat imitation Yan style and Liu style; thin imitation European style and Yu style.

Song-style characters

In the Ming Dynasty, Song-style characters evolved from Song-style characters to Ming-style characters with "horizontal lightness, straight weight, and square shape" (such as official title plaques, lanterns, and stones announcing private property boundaries). , ancestral hall god’s main card, etc. all use this font). Because this font is horizontal and vertical, easy to engrave, admirable, and easy to read, it is widely used. To this day, it is also a very popular printing font, still called "Song Ti" or "Pin Ti". Later, people gradually used calligraphy brushes to imitate Song fonts, and imitation Song fonts appeared. Some people also called imitation Song fonts "New Song" and the original lead fonts "Old Song".

Cursive writing

Cursive writing is a natural result of fast writing and constant simplification. Each font has its own cursive script that is widely used among the people, including Zhuancao, Licao (ancient official cursive script), Zhangcao (today's official cursive script), Jincao and Kuangcao (all cursive scripts of real scripts). From Li Cao to Zhang Cao, writing is faster, easier to understand, and has higher use value; Jin Cao is more sloppy, resulting in connected upper and lower characters and connected strokes, making it difficult to identify; Kuang Cao is even more so that every stroke is filled with words, and the characters are lost. The reading value has become a work of art only for appreciation.

Running script

Running script is a font written in the late Han Dynasty between real script and cursive script (real writing is faster, and it becomes running script by walking continuously like a person walking) . "The real calligraphy is like standing, and the running script is like running." On the one hand, it is inspired by the "fast and smooth" writing of Jincao, and makes up for the shortcomings of Jincao that it is not easy to read; on the other hand, it follows the "work-shaped body" of real calligraphy. , and compensated for its inability to write quickly. To this day, it is the font with the greatest practical value that can both be written quickly and recognized. The earliest calligrapher in history was Liu Desheng, and the most famous was Wang Xizhi. To sum up, the development of Chinese characters, from a physical point of view, is a history of development from pictographic pictures to line symbols, strokes suitable for writing with brushes, and printing fonts that are easy to engrave. It can also be divided into two eras: ancient writing and modern writing. The ancient writing era includes large seal script and small seal script; the transitional era from ancient writing to modern writing is ancient official script; the modern writing era includes modern official script, real script and simplified modern Chinese characters. So, what are the artistic characteristics of several types of writing in the two eras? In my opinion: the large seal script is realistic and powerful, rough and bold; the small seal script is uniformly round and soft, with a rigorous structure; the official script is dignified and elegant, giving full play to the characteristics of brush writing; the real calligraphy is neat and beautiful, further taking advantage of the use of the brush; the running script is lively and cheerful, with a connected spirit; the cursive style Powerful, compact structure. At the same time, each calligrapher has his own unique style in writing. As artistic calligraphy, it is a writing art that uses decorative techniques to beautify words. As early as the Han Dynasty, the famous writer Xu Shen divided fonts into six types, among which "bird and insect characters" were artistic calligraphy from the ancient writing era. This fully proves that our ancestors were able to write artistic calligraphy with beautiful shapes and various gestures as early as 3,000 years ago. For example, bird books, tadpole books, phoenix tail books, etc. In addition, there are some popular applied artistic calligraphy among the people, which have been popular to this day and are still popular among the masses. For example, the word double happiness, etc.

These ancient artistic calligraphy have enriched the treasure house of our country's calligraphy art. They are a valuable heritage in the field of art and are worthy of our study and reference.