Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (24) Creative Calligraphy Calendar of Year of Rooster - 鸡年挂历

We have many calligraphy works, let's put them together to create a calendar of 2017, which will be Year of Rooster, starting the New Year day in Jan 28th, 2017.

Happy Chinese New Year Day!

Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (23) Lyre, Chess, Calligraphy, and Painting - 琴棋书画

 Chinese respect people who are well educated, very knowledgeable, and scholarly. In the past thousands years, how well was a person at playing lyre, playing chess (here is the Go),  writing calligraphy, and painting has been the most popular standards. If you were good at these four, you were respected by the society, you could easily find a decent job and live in a good life.

 

Chinese put the four characters together as a proverb, or idiom - 琴棋書畫.  Let us see them one by one.

 

The big seal script for character Lyre is

Just like a lyre. 

 The small seal script of character Lyre is 

even more like the picture of a lyre.

How about character for Chess (Chinese Go)?

 

The shell bone script of character Chess is

on the top, it is Go pieces. Because it was made by wood, so use character 木（wood) to present the Go pieces.

The middle one is the box of Go pieces. The bottom are two hands holding the Go board and the Go pieces. 

The clerical script is

in which, the wood 木 right now on. The right top is the box, and bottom are two dots for two hands.

The third one character is Write or Writing, here means the skill of writing a calligraphy artwork 

 

 The top 

a hand holding a brush, the bottom 曰 is the characters on bamboo slip.

 

The fourth character is character Painting.

The small seal script of character Painting is

The top is a hand with fingers holding a brush, same as in character Write above. The bottom middle is a paper with some drawings，four lines around 田, should be wood bars to keep the paper from moving around when the brush pushing down on the paper.

 

Now, let’s see my artwork “Lyre, Chess, Calligraphy, and Painting” 

Created in 2016

Read from right to left, we have characters of Lyre, Chess (Go), Calligraphy (Write), and Painting, which a decent intellectual must be good at in China for 3000 years.

Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (22) Umbrella's Daydream - 伞的遐想

In the "Rain Umbrella" post, we knew that the standard character Umbrella is

just like a umbrella.

The big seal script of character Rain

The water drops from the sky.

The big seal script of character Sun is

The umbrella is supposed to keep out the rain for people under it.  

But in the artwork "Umbrella's Daydream", 

the umbrella could block the sunshine for rain.

Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (21) Chinese Zodiac －十二生肖

There are twelve animals in Chinese Zodiac, they are in the following order:

Mouse, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig

People see the characters in most popular Song type scripts as follows

鼠，牛，虎，兔，龙，蛇，马，羊，猴，鸡，狗，猪。

You don't relate them to the pictures of the animals because they are not like the animals at all.

However, the original old shell bone, or big seal scripts are just like the pictures of the animals.  But few people including Chinese know what they look like. Let me show you one by one.

1, Mouse (big seal script)

2, Ox (shell bone script)

3, Tiger (shell bone script)

which is a vertical tiger picture.

4, Rabbit (shell bone script)

5, Dragon (shell bone script)

6, Snake (big seal script)

7, Horse (shell bone script)

which is a vertical horse picture too.

8, Sheep (shell bone script)

9, Monkey (big seal script)

Actually it is not a pictography character. The left is an animal, the right top is a hanger, under which is an arrow. The arrow targets the animal on the hanger. The reason why ancient Chinese used this picture to mean Monkey is not clear.

10,  Rooster

11, Dog

which is a vertical dog picture.

12, Pig

which is a vertical pig picture.

Why did ancient Chinese draw vertical pictures, instead of horizontal ones? Because people wrote on bamboo or wood slips, which is narrow and long, difficult to write horizontally, but easy to write vertically.

You may ask why people don't write the shell bone and big seal scripts for the Zodiac? I don't know. But what I can do is to write all the twelve animals in shell bone, big seal script. To compare, I also wrote them in small seal scripts.

The top line are shell bone scripts and big seal scripts as I showed above. The bottom line are all small seal scripts.

From right to left are Mouse, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig.

The order for the bottom line is same for the top line. You can see some very similar, like Mouse, Ox, Sheep, others are not similar, or totally different.

I wrote them in another way, the size of each character is proportional to the animal size.

The above is shell bone script only.

The above is small seal script only.

Now you know the most pictographic Chinese Zodiac. You may find that many Chinese don't know these old scripts.