What is the basic skill of calligraphy?

The ability to control the brush, the ability to control the brush is the ability to control the front. The ancients said, "A good book is not a pen." The essence is that people with strong writing ability (strong ability to control the brush) don't care about the quality of the brush. No matter what kind of brush it is, it can be well controlled by a good writer to write beautiful stippling that conforms to the law.

Mastering the ability of ink method, the creation of calligraphy depends on the concrete embodiment of ink to express the shape of stippling, and then to express the font, style and composition. Therefore, ink control is a very important part of basic skills.

Ink is written on rice paper, so there is a problem about the relationship between ink and paper. Sun mentioned this problem in the "five good and five combinations" in the Book Score, which means "paper and ink are in harmony". "Integration of paper and ink" is the key to ink painting techniques.

The ability to control composition is the skill to control the composition of a work, including three aspects:

The first is the ability to control the font. Words can be neat, changeable, heavy or thin. Agile but not rigid, changeable but not out of shape, important but not fat and dull, thin but not hungry.

The second is the ability to control gas. The popularization of seal script, official script and regular script should be balanced with arrangement, emphasizing harmony and unity; The calligraphy style of running script and cursive script should be coherent and smooth, emphasizing rhythm and rhythm. This is a skill that must be mastered and fully displayed in the atmosphere.

The third is the ability to control the composition of the whole work, or the ability to control the composition between lines, that is, the ability to control the big rules.