Calligraphy … the beauty of artistic writing.
In all languages, calligraphic writings are a wonder. My native language is Arabic, and I love Arabic Calligraphy a lot. I don’t remember taking calligraphy classes before but I certainly love it. In my free time, I often practice writing calligraphic letters but I still am an amateur. It’ll take me months if not years to be able to writing a full sentence or create a calligraphic composition. But I’m willing to try!
Other than Arabic Calligraphy, I practiced Penman Calligraphy but not for a long time. However, I’m considering making some time to practice it at least few days a week. I love the cursive script writing and would like to go for it soon.
Coming to what I’m doing at the moment, I’m practicing Japanese Calligraphy known as Shodou (書道). It was a bit difficult at first until I was familiar with the strokes and way of writing the Kanji (Chinese originated) words. If you never studied Japanese or Chinese before, it’ll be more difficult to memorize the steps and words.
Tools
When I visit any art or stationery stores, I usually buy what I need but, whenever my eyes land on anything interesting that I may use later. Thankfully I’m still using tools I bought years ago and kept them aside. What I tend to do is that I read as much as possible about any medium or paint that I don’t know how to use then try using it. I’d probably use it for the first time but stop to make sure that I’m using it right.
During my last trip to Japan in 2019, I bought new tools. I love walking around an art store even if I have what I need. Each store have different mediums and paints which is amazing. So, I was walking around and found a mini calligraphy kit. It was beautiful. Although I didn’t know how to write Kanji at that time, but I had the feeling that I will use it one day. I was right. I took it out few weeks ago and started to use it. The packaging itself is so neat and the tools inside fit well inside the small box.
For the calligraphy brush (Fude 筆), I already had few brushes that I bought from Kuwait and Japan but I didn’t use them immediately. Staying at home had its pros in the end. After using them for a while, I started to notice the differences between using a normal painting brush and the asian brush. The Asian brushes can be used for painting and calligraphy. Yet, the normal painting brush is only for painting. In a future post, I can do a comparison between the two types of brushes and show you the difference when using each. Just to let you know how and why to use each brush.
And, there are some brush markers that are available for calligraphy. They have a brush tip instead of the normal tip so it makes it easy to write calligraphy with them. So if you feel that using a calligraphy brush is a bit difficult, try using a brush marker for a while before using a brush.
Sample Work
Here I’ll show my Japanese calligraphy work:
Anwaar 