Sunday, September 18, 2011

China crafts: Chinese calligraphy

I love the way languages look.  Different alphabets and characters have always felt like artwork to me.  And of course, there is a long tradition of artisanry in Chinese calligraphy.  So I really wanted to do a calligraphy project with The Whirl Girl.  


One of our books this month is In the Snow, a quiet story about a boy whose mother is showing him how to draw Chinese characters in the snow.  It shows 10 Chinese characters related to nature and the boy notices how the characters can be a pictorial representation of the word.  I used those words for our calligraphy, and did my best to draw them on pieces of paper so The Whirl Girl could trace them with paint.  One of them was our word of the month: (moon).



Supplies:
  • paper with Chinese characters drawn on them
  • paint
  • paintbrush

We looked at each page of the book that corresponded with the character that we were painting.  Then The Whirl Girl used her brush to paint over the pencil lines that I had drawn. 

"rain"
"tree" and The Whirl Girl taking some artistic license of her own
"sparkling" on pink, "tree" on green, "sun" on yellow, "rain" on blue, and "moon" on purple


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