WHAT THIS CATEGORY IS ABOUT

When it comes to Chinese calligraphy there are innumerable books and treaties available in China, however, in our store, we tried to reduce this vast amount of calligraphy related books and pictorial to these which have instructional character mainly.
As a result, you can find two types of instructional Chinese calligraphy books from 4 different editions at Asian Brushpainter.

One type are the so-called calligraphy water-practice book of which the usage is quickly explained. Actually these are not really books but rather large-format notbooks to which a special type of water-practice paper is added. On each double page you have a normal page on the left displaying one or several Chinese characters, on the right hand page you have a grid pattern - mostly a rice grid or a grid made of squares - printed on a specially textured paper on which you can practice the required calligraphy strokes only by means of one brush and water. Shortly after you applied a stroke, the water evaporates and you can start writing another calligraphy stroke again - this approach saves a lot of paper compared to using practice paper which can be frustrating at time - especially in the beginning.

The other type are so-called Chinese calligraphy dictionaries. These dictionaries are not dictionaries in conventional terms. They are rather inspirational books dedicated to either one specific calligraphy script style or to several Chinese calligraphy script styles which are compared in order for aspiring calligraphists to learn to distinguish the different styles. These dictionaries which focus only on one style, are often dedicated to the style of one specific calligrapher such as the famous Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty whose calligraphy style is very famous and which we personally love a lot.

Among the Chinese calligraphy water-practice books you can find two different series. One being the "May's Water Paper Book" series, the other one the "Lulu's Water Paper Book" series - both focus on the practice of the general classic script styles but also help in learning and imitating the Chinese calligraphy scripts of famous calligraphers such as Zhao Mengfu, Wang Xizhi or Yan Zhenqing.