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Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy: A Structured Course in Creating Beautiful Brush Lettering

by Rebecca Yue

Buy new: $24.95 $13.00 Buy used: $9.58

Editorial Reviews

Rebecca Yue's unique approach to calligraphy comes from years of teaching this ancient art. Most teachers prefer to demonstrate all of the basic brushstrokes before teaching you how to form words. In Rebecca's experience, however, students soon become bored with this method and fail to progress. Whilst teaching new brushstrokes, Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy allows the reader to practise them, and brushstrokes learnt previously, by writing Chinese words. From this, the reader feels a sense of achievement and satisfaction at the end of every lesson - which, in turn, stimulates them to look forward to the next exercise. As the lessons progress, the words introduced become more complicated. When there are enough words to form phrases, projects are introduced. These include painting Chinese characters onto a bonsai pot, a t-shirt, a vase and making personalised greeting cards.

Customer Reviews

Impressive introduction to chinese caligraphy, 2009-07-02
by M. M. Machon Martinez (Spain)

It is a superb book to self learn how to write chinese characters. It gives all the hints to make nice chinese writing. I strongly recommend.

Elegant and Interesting, 2009-01-17
by K. Stout (Palo Alto CA)

This book was a gift for a friend studying Chinese. It can be used both by the relatively novice Chinese writer, and by someone interested in the finer points of Chinese calligraphy. It is structured so that you can use it either to work primarily on building your language skills, or by creating calligraphy projects.

There are many illustrations that show how to construct individual strokes, and how to put them together into some of the building blocks that make up the Chinese written language. The illustrations also show finished projects, with the all the details to create them.

The descriptions of how to control the brushes to achieve different effects are very clear.

The best way to enjoy this book is with brush and paper, trying out the techniques.

Good both for the the linguist and the artist.

If you are serious about Chinese Calligraphy... This is your Book... , 2008-10-29
by Fred Gary Haun (Tampa, USA)

This book provides the basics for understanding the complex workmanship and discipline required to produce quality Chinese Calligraphy.
This is an excellent book, if you are truely serious about learning this Ancient Art.

A Good Start, 2008-08-09
by Diana L. Winsor

This is a good book to start working with Chinese Calligraphy. The instructions are clear and helpful, and many examples of characters are given to practice, in such a way that you can see and work with the different variations of the basic brushstrokes. While this book won't lead to mastery, it has certainly helped me in achieving more consistency in writing the characters.

The art projects were fun to do, and I have ended up doing some of them several times as friends and family wanted one of their own.

Best book I've found on this subject, 2007-10-08
by Roger Mastrude (Capitola, CA USA)

If you'd like to learn to write the "ABCs" of written Chinese, this is the book for you! (That's a joke, by the way, since Chinese has no ABCs.) The book gives very complete and detailed instructions for making the strokes of the Chinese characters, and building them into beautiful characters. I particularly liked the way little arrows show the movement of the tip of the brush, while up and down symbols told you when to lift the brush to its tip, or press it down.

The book is interspersed with attractive little projects you can do with Chinese characters, but the heart of the book is definitely how to write the characters themselves.