Demonstration Art

Kanji Stroke Exercises

Exercise 1

The following chart shows many of the kinds of strokes needed to create katakana characters. The exercise is to practice these strokes until you can reproduce them fairly accurately.

Exercise 2

The grid below is for practicing all of the basic katakana characters. Download the grid and print it out for your use. In Microsoft Windows, downloading can be done by right-clicking on the grid with your mouse and then left clicking on the "Save image as ..." command on the menu that pops up. If you don't have a printer or can't download it for some reason, please do as best you can with blank sheets of paper. The katakana characters you need to practice with, along with guides, are located in the Discussion.

Demonstration Painting

Step 2 in the painting guidance below calls for using mokkotsu-hō and senbyō-hō. Those are brush stroke techniques. Senbyō-hō strokes are line strokes using the tip of the brush for outlining or sketching. They are done with the brush held vertically; i.e., chokuhitsu style. Mokkotsu-hō strokes are boneless (without lines) and are used to fill in spaces using sides of the brush. The brush is held slanting or sokuhitsu style.