Next, I want to talk about what kind of writing brush is a good writing brush according to my own experience and what I have observed from ancient classic calligraphy works.
What kind of brush is a good brush? It is estimated that one hundred people will have one hundred answers to this question, but is there a standard for writing brush? I think if this standard is evaluated by everyone's pen habits, there must be too many subjective elements. However, Qi Ming believes that from an objective point of view, the brush must have a standard.
I think this standard mainly lies in that this pen is easy to write when it is used by experts at the national exhibition, and it is also easy for beginners who have just started practicing calligraphy. In fact, some inferior pens can also be controlled by experts, because experts have a higher understanding of the essence of pens than ordinary learners. They know that if they are flexible and skilled, they will only be laborious to use, but they will not be able to do it with both hands, and more often they will be clumsy; Beginners spend much less time with pens, and their skills with pens are inevitably inferior to those of experts. So there are some details that experts can show with a poor pen, but novices can't. I think the distance between them, in addition to the difference in writing level, is also an important factor, that is, tools, that is, brushes in our hands.
Some friends may still think this standard is a bit subjective after reading the above discussion. Qi Ming wants to add a requirement here, that is, this pen can be made easier when doing many subtle movements.
For example, these hairsprings in Wang Xizhi's Preface to Lanting can't be made with inferior brush.
Before Qi Ming, I posted a picture in the circle of friends on WeChat, asking everyone to guess which of the three garters is the best pen for writing. The picture is as follows:
As a result, although some book lovers think the pen on the left or in the middle is better, I am glad to see that many book lovers have chosen the right-most stroke, which means that everyone, like me, thinks that the pen used to write the right-most stroke is the best. That's true. The strokes on the right were written by Qi Ming's own customized brush at that time. The two pens on the left are bought from the so-called pen family in WeChat. I didn't mean to belittle others to raise myself. I want to say that pen owners may be unreliable sometimes. Whether the writing is good or not, just dip the pen in ink and write a stroke is enough to judge.
Here, I quote two pictures from a pamphlet "Calligraphy" compiled by Mr. Hu, and give an example from Hu's "Bizhuang" to let everyone know how to judge whether a pen is really easy to write. As shown in the figure:
You can feel the difference between good and bad by using the pictures of three hanging needles I sent. Inferior brushes are often stiff, not round and smooth, and difficult to control. For example, when the hanging needle is finally pointed out, the inferior brush will have strong elasticity (too much nylon, or too strong, which is quite different from the strength shown by the high-quality wolf brush, but the real wolf hair is not so hard) to draw uncontrollably.
This is a partial screenshot of Wang Xizhi's calligraphy collection "Feng Ju Tie" selected from the primary color calligraphy posts of Erxuan Society in Japan. You can feel the exquisiteness of Wang Xizhi's pen.
At present, Qi Ming has more than 100 used and unused brushes in his hand, some of which he bought when he looked at them and felt like it (I don't know if it was a hobby), but after trying more pens slowly, I began to feel the advantages and disadvantages of different pens. This is probably what the ancients said. If you don't know, at least you have a correct understanding.
At the same time, I also want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to all the friends who will use Qi Ming custom pens in the future. If you think the pens made in Qi Ming are not easy to use, please contact me to return them, and you don't need to buy the brushes made in Qi Ming in the future, because my standards have been formed, and there may be obvious personal preferences, which means that I think pens that are easy to write will only be sold to friends who also feel easy to write.
At the same time, I actually have my own concerns, that is, many beginners may not know enough about writing brushes, which leads to some misunderstandings about calligraphy pens. When communicating with many friends who just started to brush calligraphy, I saw many friends say that they need pure sheep brush and pure wolf brush. In fact, Huang Jian also talked about this in Huang Jian's Calligraphy Elementary Video Course. Pure wool is too soft to use, nor pure wolf hair without a trace of other materials.
Speaking of which, I remembered an interesting story I mentioned when chatting with a stationery seller. A friend who is a beginner in calligraphy bought his Mo Ding, brought it back and directly soaked it in the inkstone with boiling water. After soaking for a long time, he made a bad comment on the online shop and complained to this friend that your ink was too hard to melt ... This really made people laugh and cry.