Calligraphy Class
In our last week of school last week, I took a calligraphy class. We began by making stamps. Japanese people use a personal stamp for official documents instead of signing in pen.
Our teacher had done some research on the meaning of each of our names. At school I was known as "Samansa" (because the "th" sound doesn't exist in Japanese), so my teacher suggested I break down my name into "sa," which can imply small, then "man," which means 10,000, and "sa," which (apparently) means sand. Here my name is written in katakana at the top, and then broken into the kanji for small 10,000 sand below that:
So I traced the outline of my stamp and copied those figures onto paper inside of that outline. Then, flipped the paper over and wrote the mirror-image of my kanji onto the base of my stamp. Finally, I used a little tool to carve where my pen marks were.
Fun!
Once I had my stamp, I was ready to... create art! But first, I needed paint.
We were taught the traditional method of putting regular water into a special dish, and then using a stick of compressed ash (propped against the dish from behind, in the upper right of this photo) to turn the water black. We rubbed the ash stick against the bottom of the dish, so it would dissolve into the water, for a few minutes. The longer you rub, the blacker the water turns.
Then we learned how to paint the kanji for "dream" with the correct brushstroke order and everything. Apparently it's considered the most artistic if you can make uneven strokes, so that the lines aren't uniform, but rather have some character. For instance, our teacher showed us how to make a stroke so that the top portion of the line would have breaks in it as if there weren't quite enough ink on that part of the brush, while the bottom part was solid black.
Since I'm not too sure what this kanji is *supposed* to look like, it felt like a bit of a shot in the dark for me. The teacher would highly compliment a particular stroke every so often (while politely not mentioning the other strokes on my page), and I would think, "really? that one's good??" So it was always a big surprise finding out which parts I did well, and not so well.
And... voila! Mine is the top row, second-to-right here: the one with my stamp on it :)
