Renmen: Japanese Calligraphy

Two sheets of paper, side by side. The model on the left, your practice on the right. Practice does not stop at the screen. It carries on to paper. FOUR WAYS TO PRACTICE 1. Write on the screen Write with a finger or a pen. Pressure and speed make the line swell and thin. Strokes enter narrow and lift away at the end. 2. Put paper on the screen and trace Lay a sheet on the screen and trace the model showing through it. For pencil, felt-tip and brush pens. Lock the screen and your hand will not draw. Mark the four corner guides with a pencil dot and you can always put the sheet back where it was. 3. Photograph what you wrote and compare Photograph the finished sheet and it is laid over the model. The model sits in a light colour and your writing stays black, so the screen never turns into a red-pen correction. You can also flip between the two. 4. Put the iPad on a stand and write under the camera Place the iPad screen-up on a stand. The rear camera shows the paper below it, with the model laid over it in a light colour. Watch the screen and write straight onto the paper, even paper you cannot see through: envelopes, gift envelopes, shikishi, tanzaku, notebooks. For brush pens, markers and pencils. TRACING IS NOT ON AND OFF The model fades on a continuous scale from zero. Darker today, one notch lighter tomorrow. Support comes away a little at a time. This was made for children who find writing hard. The one thing it insists on is never taking the support away all at once. CHOOSING A MODEL - Type the text - Photograph a model. A sheet written by hand becomes a model as it is - Choose from the Jiucheng Gong Liquan Bei, all 1,109 characters, by text order or by character PAPER IS HELD IN REAL MILLIMETRES Hanshi, hankaishi, hansetsu, yatsugiri, shikishi, tanzaku. The app shows how many millimetres the sheet is on screen right now. Brush width is based on the real size of the paper, not on the grid. MADE TO BE USABLE - Left-handed layout. The model goes on the right, so your writing hand does not cover it - Guide lines are blue by default. Red can be hard to see with some colour vision. Red is still there for those who want to match a textbook - The grid can be resized - Japanese, English, simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese, switched on the spot - The trace board and write-under-the-camera controls sit at the bottom of the screen and can be hidden. Hiding or locking never moves the paper - The camera view can be moved left, right, up or down, so your writing hand does not cover it NOTHING IS COLLECTED - No network - No account, no sign-in - No advertising - No in-app purchases - Photographs are never saved. They are handled on the device and then gone - The camera view is never recorded or saved. The camera stops when you close the screen ABOUT FONTS No calligraphy fonts are bundled. Load your own .ttf or .otf. Please use fonts you hold the rights to. Free, with no advertising.