Types of artistic characters
1. From the country, it can be divided into Chinese artistic characters and foreign artistic characters.
2. From the point of use,
it can be divided into living printing, book binding, environmental layout, blackboard newspaper, wall newspaper, commercial art, advertisement, trademark and so on.
3. In terms of form,
it can be divided into plane artistic characters and three-dimensional artistic characters; Or realistic calligraphy and freehand brushwork calligraphy.
4. According to the font,
it can be divided into three categories: Songti, Bold and Variant.
The development process of calligraphy
People should pay attention to calligraphy and understand calligraphy, so it is necessary to know the origin of Chinese characters and calligraphy. On the basis of language, human beings have produced words. What is writing? Characters are symbols used to record languages. Chinese characters are symbols for recording Chinese. It has gone through several stages of evolution, such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions, bronze inscription, Dazhuan, Xiaozhuan, Lishu, regular script, cursive script and running script.
Oracle Bone Inscriptions
In p>1899, the earliest Shang Dynasty "Oracle Bone Inscriptions" was discovered in Anyang, Henan Province. It has a history of more than 3, years. It is both pictographic and phonetic. It can be seen that it originated from pictures and had a long history of development before the Shang Dynasty. "Bronze inscriptions" are words cast on bronzes, and both of them are collectively called "A bronze inscription". Among them, some characters are the same as pictures. We call them pictographs, which are very vivid. For example, the sun, the moon, the mountains, the water, the grass, the trees, the fish, and the birds. (The characters in ancient western countries such as Egypt and Greece were also developed from "pictorial characters-the era of capital letters-the era of lowercase letters". For example, A developed from the cow's head, B from the yard, K from the grass, M from the water, O from the eyes, N from the snake and R from the human head. . . . . . ）。
Shi Guwen
Later, the characters in China experienced "Shi Guwen" (characters carved on stone drums), which belonged to the characters of the Zhou Dynasty. Later, the ancient script books circulated in the Han Dynasty and the characters carved on the walls were all ancient scripts, collectively referred to as "Da Zhuan". Compared with the original Oracle Bone Inscriptions, the development of Da Zhuan seal is linear, even and soft, concise and vivid; The second is standardization, the font tends to be neat, and gradually leaves the original shape of the picture, laying the foundation for the square characters.
Xiao Zhuan
After Qin Shihuang unified the whole country, he abolished the characters that were not unified with Qin Wen. After Li Si and others collected, sorted out and simplified them, a unified character-Xiao Zhuan was produced. Compared with junior college, Xiao Zhuan's shape is simplified, and its lineation and standardization have reached a perfect level. It is almost completely separated from pictures and characters, and looks neat and harmonious, very beautiful, and basically a rectangular square font. (Demonstration) Compared with the big seal, the small seal has made progress, but it also has its shortcomings, that is, it is inconvenient to carve with a knife and write with a pen. Therefore, almost at the same time, a kind of characters-official script, which spread to both sides and became a flat square, was produced. The ancient official script is a font that transits from Xiao Zhuan to today's official script, and it is also a bridge between ancient Chinese characters and today's characters. It is characterized by changing the uniform lines with equal thickness of seal script into straight and angular strokes such as horizontal, straight, dot, left, pick, click and hook, which makes it much more convenient to write with a pen. For example, the word "Tian" is written in Xiao Zhuan, with a circle outside and a cross inside. It is difficult to write a circle, so it is much easier to write the word "Tian" when the ancient official script becomes straight and square. The appearance of official script also abandoned the pictographic characters drawn by Xiao Zhuan with real objects, which changed the characters with pictographic and semantic meanings before the Qin Dynasty into characters with semantic and phonetic meanings, and began to shape the 2,-year-old Chinese characters. "Guli" developed to the Han Dynasty, and on the basis of straightness and angularity, it formed a "Jinli" which is fair and beautiful, and has the potential to pick the method. Compared with Guli, it gave full play to the characteristics of brush writing and formed a more mature and beautiful font. Because her two strokes are scattered to both sides, like an "eight", it is also called an "eight-point book" (Wang Cizhong in the Eastern Han Dynasty is more famous).
regular script
real books are also called regular script and regular script. It began to sprout in the Western Han Dynasty, but it was immature in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and flourished after the Wei Dynasty. True calligraphy evolved directly from modern Li, with little difference in physical structure, but with different pen methods: the brush strokes in modern Li are smooth; The physical structure of Jinli is straight and square, with an eight-self-shaped flat square, while the real book is a square with a permanent shape; Today's Chinese characters expand outward, while real books concentrate inward, forming today's Chinese characters. Several true calligraphers in the Three Kingdoms period also had the style of official script. Later, Wang Xizhi, a true calligrapher in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and his son Wang Xianzhi completely got rid of the style of official script.
Typography
In the Tang and Song Dynasties, the economy was developed, and there was also a "golden age" in writing. Especially in the middle of the 11th century, Bi Sheng invented "printing" (movable type printing) and was called "the mother of civilization". At that time, Buddhist scriptures, almanac and other printed materials were very popular, and later they were introduced to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Iran, Egypt and Europe. After the invention of printing, the carving knife used for lettering has had a profound influence on the shape of Chinese characters, resulting in a preliminary printing font that is "horizontal and light, straight and heavy, and eye-catching". In the Northern Song Dynasty, the common printing font with "square and uniform structure" was called "Song typeface". At that time, there were two kinds of fonts carved: fat imitation face and Liu Ti; Thin imitation of European body and dangerous body.
Song typeface
In the Ming Dynasty, it changed from Song typeface to Ming typeface with "horizontal light and straight weight, square font" (for example, this typeface is used for official title cards, lanterns, notices of private boundary stones, and ancestral temple gods' main cards, etc.). This font is widely used because it is horizontal and vertical, easy to carve, admired and easy to read. Until today, it is also a very popular printing font, and it is still called "Song Zizi" or "Lead Zizi". Later, people gradually imitated the words of Song Dynasty with a brush, and then there appeared imitation Song Dynasty. Some people called imitation Song Dynasty "New Song Dynasty", and the original lead font was "Old Song Dynasty".
cursive script
cursive script is produced naturally by rapid writing and continuous simplification. Each font has a cursive script that has been used in the folk, including seal grass, official cursive script (official cursive script), Zhang grass (official cursive script), present grass and crazy grass (all cursive scripts of real books). Writing from Li Cao to Zhang Cao is fast, easy to understand and of high use value; Today's grass is scrawled, resulting in the connection of upper and lower characters and strokes, which is not easy to identify; Wild grass is full of words every bit, losing the reading value of words and becoming a work of art for appreciation only.
Running script
Running script is a font between real script and cursive script in the late Han Dynasty (real writing is fast, and it becomes running script by walking continuously like a human). On the one hand, it is inspired by the "fast and smooth" writing of modern grass, and it makes up for the shortcomings that modern grass is not easy to read; On the other hand, it follows the "neat form" of real books, and remedies its inability to write quickly. Until today, it is a font that can be written quickly and recognized, and has the greatest practical value. The earliest calligrapher in history is Liu Desheng, and the most famous is Wang Xizhi. To sum up, the development of Chinese characters, from the physical point of view, is a history of development from pictographic pictures to line symbols, strokes adapted to brush writing and printed fonts convenient for carving. It can also be divided into ancient Chinese characters and modern Chinese characters. The era of ancient Chinese characters includes big seal and small seal; The transitional era from ancient Chinese characters to modern Chinese characters is ancient Li; Today's writing era includes today's official script, real script and simplified modern Chinese characters. Then, what are the artistic features of several characters in the two eras? I think: Da Zhuan is realistic and powerful, rough and bold; Small seals are round and soft, and the structure is rigorous; The official script is dignified and quaint, giving full play to the characteristics of writing with a brush; Real books are neat and beautiful, which further exerts the advantages of brush application; The running script is lively and cheerful, and the pulse is connected; The cursive script is excited by wind and electricity, and its structure is compact. At the same time, each calligrapher has his own unique style in writing. As an artistic character, it is a kind of writing art that beautifies characters by decorative techniques. As early as the Han Dynasty, Xu Shen, a famous writer, divided the fonts into six types, among which "Bird and Insect Characters" was the artistic characters in the ancient Chinese characters era. This fully shows that our ancestors were able to write artistic characters with beautiful shapes and postures as early as 3, years ago. For example, bird books, tadpoles, phoenix tail books and so on. In addition, there are some popular folk applied fine arts characters, which have been popular until today and are still loved by the masses. For example, the word double happiness. These ancient calligraphy characters enrich the treasure house of Chinese calligraphy art and are a valuable legacy in the art field, which is worth learning and learning from.