Brushes are generally made of bamboo or wood with animal hair or plant fiber as the pen tip. Therefore, pens made of different kinds of animal hair have different names. Such as wool, wolf hair, purple hair (rabbit hair), chicken feathers, mane, moustache and so on.
According to their performance, the types of brushes can be roughly divided into three categories, namely "soft hair", "hard hair" and "double brush"
Rouhao: Made of animal hair with weak elasticity and low hardness, it looks soft. For example, "wool" made of wool and "chicken feathers" made of chicken feathers. One of the most common is wool. It is characterized by soft nib, easy ink absorption and easy pen opening. Among soft pens, the largest one is called Hawthorn Pen, followed by Doubi, Libi, Lianbi and Screen Pen, and the third one is commonly used regular script pens.
Hard hair: It is made of animal hair with strong elasticity and hardness, such as mountain rabbit hair, weasel hair and mountain horse hair. They have different names because their hair is different. Purple rabbit hair is called "purple hair", weasel tail hair is called "wolf hair", and what mice have to do is called "mouse whistle" The characteristics of bristles are sharp, firm and elastic, and the sharpness of strokes is easy to show. Bai Juyi, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, once wrote the poem "Purple Brush": "The purple brush is as sharp as a cone and as sharp as a knife: there are old rabbits on the rocks in the south of the Yangtze River, and eating bamboo and drinking water gives birth to purple brushes; Xuancheng workers take pens and choose one out of ten million. "
Double-stranded brush: made of two or more animal hairs with different elasticity according to a certain proportion. Is a kind of gel pen between soft and hard, characterized by moderate hardness and elasticity. For example, the "three purple seven sheep hairs" made of 30% rabbit hair and 70% sheep hair, others such as "nine purple one sheep", "seven purple three sheep", "five purple five sheep" and "two purple eight sheep", and various double brushes such as "wolf sheep hair", "purple wolf hair" and "chicken wolf hair" are hard or soft respectively.
In addition, pens made of animal hair include deer hair, musk deer hair, tiger hair, duck hair and goose hair. These pens are expensive because they are well selected. Some are made of precious materials such as ivory, sapphire, rhinoceros horn, red sandalwood and glass. Exquisite decoration and exquisite calligraphy and painting. These rare things are no longer practical and can only be displayed and appreciated as handicrafts.
Among them, according to the size and use of their pens, they can be roughly divided into large, medium and small pens (or large, medium and small pens). Write small print with little wolf hair, little wool, seven purple three sheep, five purple five sheep, small white cloud, etc. Write Chinese characters with pens such as wolf hair, wool and white clouds; Write big characters with a pen, such as Yang Hao, font size, big white clouds, etc. Write big grass and wild grass with chicken feathers; Write a screen bar with a long milliscreen pen; The inscription plaque is a pen made of bristles; Those who write extra-large characters are called "bucket pens". According to the length of the brush, it is generally divided into "long front", "center" and "short front"
As for all kinds of pens named after their makers or places of origin, there are not a few pens from ancient times to now, such as the pen of the Southern Song Dynasty, the pen of Cheng Yi in the Song Dynasty, the pen of Wang Boli in Xuancheng, Anhui Province, and the pen of Hu in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province.