Then read the seal of Master Ding Jing, the originator of the "Zhejiang School". As we said, those master-level great seal engravers are the most worthy of repeated study.
(Ding Jing sitting statue)
At the age of 69, Master Ding Jing carved a pair of white seals for his nephew Chen Hongbin, one side of the print "Chen Hongbin Seal" and the other side "Chen Shi Keyi". This is the work of Master Ding Jing in his later years (the master died at the age of 71), and it is a work of great god level that has truly reached the realm of "people are old". In fact, this most common Chinese-White printed work is the most powerful. Let's discuss the basic means of creating the Han-Bai Wenyin in conjunction with the works of the masters.
Let's only discuss one of these parties, which is this side of "Chen's Keyi":
(Ding Jing's "Chen's Keyi" and its side paragraphs)
The side section of this square seal is simple, only saying "Yanlin Village Is The System of Ke Yi Xian Nephew System", and the side section of the other side seal is longer: "My nephew Ke Yi, Filial Piety Min Lian, can write and work, and brother Wei Uncle has the eyes of difficult brothers and difficult brothers, Chengdaegu Gate in the Aung Ang Thousand Mile Colt also, the old man every time he enjoys carving for it, he does not know his own and tired, this name two seals are particularly cooperative. The honorific body is recorded in Yanlin, when the year is sixty and nine, and the second day after the second month of the second month of The Emperor. ”
From this side section content, it can be seen that At this time, Ding Jing has not been able to see and have less energy, which is a work accumulated by his creative habits.
The style of the Han four-character white seal printing style in the seal engraving is derived from the practical seal of the Han four-character white text, and its biggest printing surface feature is: "Equally divided printing surface, any sparse and dense". That is, the printed surface of a square is divided into four small squares of equal size, each with an equal area size. As shown in the figure:
(Chinese seal object: Fan Chang private seal)
The printing surface is evenly distributed on the printing surface by four words, and the creator does not consider the complexity and simplicity of each word, and arranges it within the same printing area:
(Equally divided printing surface, Ren Shu Ren Mi's Han and Bai seal method features)
As shown in the figure above, the Hanbai four-character seal will not shrink the area because of the simplicity of the "big" glyph in position 1, nor will it increase the area area because of the dense glyph of the "medical" character in position 2. The status of the four characters on the printing surface is the same, and the level is uniform, so the breath of the four-character seal in The Han and Bai script is "pingzheng and stable", because it is average and equal.
But after all, Chinese characters originated from pictograms and ideographic characters, so it must have dense differences, in order to meet this difference, the Han people in the printing of the chapter treatment, occasionally will also create different chapter aesthetic styles, such as:
(Different chapter styles)
The first party, the seal of Niu Sheng, because the "Sheng" character is densely shaped, therefore, the craftsmen have elongated the "yin" character to form a "diagonal echo" chapter; the second party, Zhou Jun Yanyin, because the "Yan" glyph is dense, the craftsmen alone enlarged its area, so that it occupies part of the area of "Jun", forming a "three sparse and one dense" chapter.
These types of chapters were "generalized" by later artists, such as Ding Jing's Fang Seal:
If we mark the water level and vertical equipartance lines of the equipartition surface, we will find that Master Ding Jing has done this in terms of the chapter of this square seal:
(Cross Equipartition)
"Chen" and "Yi" two glyphs with dense left and right structure of the word, is processed in the diagonal position, which is the result of active processing, because the word order uses the "palindromic" word order, using the "1342" word order, the purpose is to create a diagonal echo of the obvious chapter, the two glyphs of dense left and right structure of the word, both encroach on the other two single structure glyph simple characters of the equal position: "Chen" character not only occupies the position of the same side of the "clan", but also to the transverse side of the "ke" word loan, and "yi" The character not only occupies the position of the upper "ke", but also borrows the position of the "clan" character on the horizontal side, which actually achieves the equal balance between the left and right and the upper and lower sides of the printing surface.
(Clear regular diagonal echo)
The equally divided printing surface of the Chinese seal, Ren Shu Renmi, is the stable and smooth "static" chapter beauty created by the craftsmen; the "diagonal echo" and "balance of gravity" created by the seal engravers who seek the printing surface in the "change" is the beauty of the "dynamic" chapter. This is the dividing line between practical seals and seal engravings.
Art is to seek "change", whether it is lines, or glyphs, or chapters, "change" is the highest form of art, the process of "change" in the creation of seal engraving artists, it has never been to engrave the text evenly and neatly, but to find the glyph difference of the creative text material (this difference naturally exists), and make good use of it to create "change". Make it meet people's aesthetic requirements - people's visual psychology, naturally have aesthetic satisfaction with regular figures or patterns and lines with certain laws, such as neat queues, trees, and arranged things (of course, it does not exclude people's desire for wild, messy, messy, and wild mountain wilderness, but that belongs to another type of aesthetic type).
Ding Jing was still able to carve such exquisite and wonderful works until he was blind and tired, which was because of his familiarity and familiarity with the basic seal engraving techniques, in fact, all the seal engraving masters were accumulated and stacked by these simple seal engraving methods.
([Pudding Reading] No. 97, some pictures from the Internet)