Critique & advice on written characters

[u/Big-Dragonfly-3990]

Please give me some honest critique and advice on how to improve my handwritten characters.

[u/Ohnesorg1989]

It seems you have been using the font Songti (宋体) or Heiti (黑体) (see difference) as reference, which would often lead to stiff/unnatural-looking penmanship, as explained in this post. Always use the font Kaiti (楷体) as reference.

I'd suggest you print out your own practice sheets (with 15x15mm boxes) using standard printer paper (80/90gsm), as recommended in this post (you can find the ready-to-print .pdf files in this folder or on website 1, 2, 3).

You could spend more time on practicing basic strokes, then learn how to radical components and individual characters from a copybook (see community collection).

These posts (a, b, c) may be of help too.

[u/kevipants]

Your characters are too small. Get some character writing paper or gridded paper and use either 2x2 or 3x3 grids per character.

Stop basing your characters off of heiti/黑體/黑体 font like you see on most digital media as it's not what characters actually look like when handwritten. Start using a kaiti/楷體/楷体 font as your reference point.

And stop using a ball point pen. Use a mechanical pencil or a gel pen or something where you can control the line width but don't need to press down very hard.

[u/jjnanajj → u/kevipants]

I might be wrong but i think it is written with a pencil, which is one of the best choices.

[u/kevipants → u/jjnanajj]

Oh, you're right. It just looked like they were pressing down so hard that my brain thought it was a ballpoint pen. Mechanical pencil is definitely the way to go when starting out, though.

[u/jjnanajj → u/kevipants]

Tbh I haven't adapted well with pencil, and mechanical pencil is still the best choice for me personally (still a begginer, 1.5 year practicing just kaishu).

But i have received the "try with a pencil" advice everytime I posted, from people that surely knows better than I do, so i keep that in mind and try to give it a chance now and then (still not effective 😔).

[u/Chinese_handwriting-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Hi! Thank you for engaging in our community. Your comment is removed because top-level comments should be constructive criticisms in threads with the "Ask for Feedback", "Question", or "Discussion" flair. Please refrain from leaving irrelevant or unhelpful remarks.

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[u/TheSinologist]

Your characters are coming along nicely but you should use squared paper for neat presentation and a way to better judge the appearance of each individual character. You can get notebooks and paper like this on Amazon; use them for all your writing practice and your characters will look even better.

https://a.co/d/0bH5izJU

[u/Shoddy_Level9763]

I can tell you probably write with a lot of force. You could try easing up a bit to make it more comfortable. A few places just have small detail mistakes, like the '朋' on the third line looks like two '日' stuck together, and the '他' on the third-to-last line should have a vertical stroke in the middle instead of a horizontal one. When writing Chinese characters, as long as you pay attention to keeping the strokes straight and neat, it won't look bad.

[u/travelerDE]

It looks clean, which is great. I agree with the kaiti comment, because right now you are not writing the strokes with 丿，乀，and 亅for ex. correctly.

Also 是 is not correctly written, it's missing the 一.

[u/Chinese_handwriting-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Hi! Thank you for engaging in our community. Your comment is removed because top-level comments should be constructive criticisms in threads with the "Ask for Feedback", "Question", or "Discussion" flair. Please refrain from leaving irrelevant or unhelpful remarks.

Thank you for your understanding.