Spent Saturday volunteering at the Jing’an Disabled Centre – doing Calligraphy! Jing’an Disabled Centre is my favourite place to volunteer at, because I love the students there who are so smiley and sweet. They recognise me now and it was really nice seeing their smile of recognition when I stepped in 🙂 One even wanted me to sign my name on his bit of paper – hee! The center coordinators also know me well by now, so they asked for a photo with me – on their camera though, not mine, so I don’t have a copy – doh! The place is bright and open and cheery, and really clean and organised.

We had big papers with Chinese characters on them, and placed a sheet of thin tracing paper on top. Then we used the Chinese paint brushes and painted the characters – kinda like Calligraphy for Beginners 😉 It sounds easy but it’s NOT!!! It was actually really difficult because Chinese characters have a certain movement to them.. so it’s thick at some points, thin at others. And you actually need to know your stroke order, and where to start/end the stroke… most of which I don’t know so my characters actually looked worse than the students’ – for shame 😛

We had lots of fun though, and now I have a lot of respect for calligraphy masters. The paint each character suppperrrrr slooowwwwwlllyyyy and now I know why – I’m impatient and painted quickly and so couldn’t really control the pressure of my brush, and the trick is in exercising control and patience. Amongst which I have very little of 😉 Still, was fairly pleased with my end result.. at least the characters could be read! Well, but someone that knows how to read Chinese, that is.

The cheery entrance

Calligraph teaching time!

The materials

Listening attentively

Getting into it

Painting away

ROFL!!

Distracted from my *ahem* artwork 😛

Me oh-so-studiously working on my calligraphy… LOL

Taaaa daaaa!

The finished works

I don’t normally do “arty” photos, but I like this one!

This is my name! 😀

All of us!