WHAT THIS CATEGORY IS ABOUT
The category of Practice Paper contains several types of Chinese paper and paper related products.
First of all, most practice papers tend to come in smaller formats than the Classic Artwork Papers, the reason being that to practice calligraphy or sumi and for beginners, it is way easier to write on a smaller sheet of paper which you can easily place on your study in front of you as on a large sheet writing on which requires far more skills and a steady technique in yielding the brush requiring perfect posture and body tension.
Apart from being smaller in size, Chinese practice rice paper for calligraphy writing often comes with orientation or guiding patterns; the most frequent ones being lines or grid patterns. The grid patterns most often found on Chinese practice paper are rice grid patterns, diamond grid patterns or just squares - the grids help you manage the size of your Chinese characters to that after spending some time practicing with Chinese paper, you automatically mange to write all your Chinese characters in the same or similar size fitting a grid pattern since you are used to restricting your strokes to the grids pre-printed on the rice paper.
Then, practice paper is often made of cheaper materials such as bamboo or mulberry than high-end shuen papers which have a very high percentage of the bark of the Chinese Qing Tan tree as part of their main ingredients.
Another difference is that expert papers as you can find them in the Classic Artwork Paper are more difficult to work with for beginner since they either have a very low degree of absorbency - such as papers used for fineline painting - or a very high absorbency degree which requires more experience than semi-sized papers.
Finally we add practice tools such as Magic Calligrapy practice paper, allowing you to practice your strokes with water on a specially textured material where the stroke disappears after some time.