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Copybook(Chinese: 字帖，或習字帖, Pinyin: Zi Tie)，means the copybooks for calligraphy.

The origin of copybook
In ancient times, the famous calligraphy was carved in stone. Later, people made rubbing of the stone in paper so that they could copy and learn the great calligraphy.

The emperor of Liang Dynasty, Xiao Yan, made rubbing of one thousand characters from a famous calligrapher, Wang Xizhi, and made sentences and paragraphs for the one thousand characters, which is < Thousand>. Then the  became a systematic copybook.

Classification
Copybook can be divided according to the type of fond. It can also be divided by what kind of pen you use to write.

The Type of fond

Regular script(楷书）, cursive（草书）, running script（行书）, official script（隶书）, Seal（篆书）

Pen

Brush calligraphy(using brushes), hard calligraphy( using ball point pens, pencils, or fountain pens)

Modern role
Nowadays in China, children who just enter school would have a copybook for learning characters better. Because they just learn writing for a short time, it is hard for children to write characters in their own style. Copybooks can help children practice different fond of handwriting and build their own style. If people want to learn calligraphy, besides "Four Treasures", they also need to prepare copybooks which the type of fond is what they want to learn. Because the choice of copybooks would decide the style people write in.

Steps

 * Read: When first see a character, read the fond, the structure, the order of strokes, analyze the relationship between the strokes and figure out the feature of the character.
 * Trace: Learners can just write on the book or use transparent paper cover the characters and copy it, which is also known as shadow copy writing.
 * Copy: Put the copybook aside, and try best to write the characters exactly what they looks on another paper.
 * Remember: Remember the character in the mind and write on the paper without looking at the copybook.
 * Create: After grasping the writing on the copybook, learners can create their own style.

Other
Since Yin Dynasty, it became popular to engrave words on stone to make them spread further and longer, but not calligraphy. Since Tang Dynasty, people began to save the beauty of calligraphy on the stone. So rubbing calligraphy was popular in that time.

Before the development of new technology, calligraphy can only be learned by using stone rubbings. However, there had to be some mistakes. The new technology, Jingying Technology, actually helps learners a lot because the rubbing is much more like the original calligraphy.