![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Calligraphy!
Monday, October 8th, 2012 01:23 amI went to a calligraphy class on Saturday. (My calligraphy teacher reads this. Ummmm you might want to avert your eyes while you still can <3)
Two things about calligraphy. First: calligraphy is easy.
As long as you start the stroke right, the pen basically does the work for you.
Whenever I force the stroke to become a particular shape, it looks horrible. But when I concentrate on getting the pen against the paper just so, the stroke follows naturally from the angle of the pen. It's gorgeous. It's magic. There are moments when one stroke in isolation from everything else is graceful and elegant.
Which brings me to my second point: calligraphy is hard.
Calligraphy is as much about one stroke as music is about one note. You have to get each stroke perfect and it has to be in harmony with the strokes around it. Distance, size, proportion -- all important. All *hard*
Resisting my inclination to fight the pen for control? Hard.
Recognizing a good stroke from a very bad one? Reasonably easy.
Recognizing a good stroke from a stroke that's almost there? Hard.
Deciding where to start the stroke so that it won't crowd against the previous one? Hard.
Following the mandated x-height? Hard.
Controlling the proportion of each part of a stroke? Hard.
Getting all this correct consistently, stroke after stroke? You guessed it: Hard.
I'm not complaining, understand. I'm just slowly coming to the realization that the obvious thing that I thought would be hard isn't, while a host of invisible things I hadn't given any thought to are really really difficult. (But on the good side: I think I can trick myself into thinking of these invisible things as math, which I can doooo rather than art which I flail at without making any visible progress)
I'm hesitantly coming to the conclusion that the physical motion of the pen -- the smoothness of the lines -- is easy. The angle of the pen is what's hard. This is pretty much the opposite of using a ballpoint pen.
(OH speaking of angles, I am quite happy because one of the things I'm supposed to do now is to practice a stroke where the angle of the pen changes mid-stroke. And I was worried because while fiddlier than anything I'd previously done, I couldn't "feel" the change in angle, and I couldn't see what was changing. I was supposed to end up with half an "m", and I was getting reasonably close, but I just wasn't sure I wasn't doing something wrong, you know?
So I tried the same motion, but this time *not* changing the angle of the pen. This time I ended up with a stroke slashing downward left to right, kind of like the lower leg of a "k" -- so I have convinced myself that I'm probably on the right track with the previous.
There's a term for this in either logic or debugging -- or maybe both. Something about disproving!)
Two things about calligraphy. First: calligraphy is easy.
As long as you start the stroke right, the pen basically does the work for you.
Whenever I force the stroke to become a particular shape, it looks horrible. But when I concentrate on getting the pen against the paper just so, the stroke follows naturally from the angle of the pen. It's gorgeous. It's magic. There are moments when one stroke in isolation from everything else is graceful and elegant.
Which brings me to my second point: calligraphy is hard.
Calligraphy is as much about one stroke as music is about one note. You have to get each stroke perfect and it has to be in harmony with the strokes around it. Distance, size, proportion -- all important. All *hard*
Resisting my inclination to fight the pen for control? Hard.
Recognizing a good stroke from a very bad one? Reasonably easy.
Recognizing a good stroke from a stroke that's almost there? Hard.
Deciding where to start the stroke so that it won't crowd against the previous one? Hard.
Following the mandated x-height? Hard.
Controlling the proportion of each part of a stroke? Hard.
Getting all this correct consistently, stroke after stroke? You guessed it: Hard.
I'm not complaining, understand. I'm just slowly coming to the realization that the obvious thing that I thought would be hard isn't, while a host of invisible things I hadn't given any thought to are really really difficult. (But on the good side: I think I can trick myself into thinking of these invisible things as math, which I can doooo rather than art which I flail at without making any visible progress)
I'm hesitantly coming to the conclusion that the physical motion of the pen -- the smoothness of the lines -- is easy. The angle of the pen is what's hard. This is pretty much the opposite of using a ballpoint pen.
(OH speaking of angles, I am quite happy because one of the things I'm supposed to do now is to practice a stroke where the angle of the pen changes mid-stroke. And I was worried because while fiddlier than anything I'd previously done, I couldn't "feel" the change in angle, and I couldn't see what was changing. I was supposed to end up with half an "m", and I was getting reasonably close, but I just wasn't sure I wasn't doing something wrong, you know?
So I tried the same motion, but this time *not* changing the angle of the pen. This time I ended up with a stroke slashing downward left to right, kind of like the lower leg of a "k" -- so I have convinced myself that I'm probably on the right track with the previous.
There's a term for this in either logic or debugging -- or maybe both. Something about disproving!)
