Calligraphy for beginners
Today I met 赵铮 (Zhào Zheng) to have my first lesson in Chinese calligraphy. She is one of two students I helped to learn German before, in order to study in Germany. We started with practicing the single kinds of strokes before taking the challenge of painting the first Chinese character, 永 (yŏng; meaning “forever”), which contains all of them. Zhao Zheng even gave me a small Calligraphy set (文房四宝 wén fáng sì băo), consisting of two brushes (笔 bǐ) the ink stone (Tuschestein; 墨 mò), rice paper (宣纸 xuān zhǐ) and 砚 (yàn, which is the basin, the ink is prepared in).
My second character to try was 福 (fù; “luck， happiness”), which is very popular in China for temples (see picture in my last post “Beautiful Sichuan”) or putting at the door to invite good spirits, especially during the new year’s festival. Zhao Zheng had a very interesting way of commenting my work, when I could not paint it correctly she said “Das ist eine Innovation, aber auch sehr gut. Wir brauchen Innovation.” (in english: “This is innovative, but also very good. We need innovations.”) 
In this short video I am painting a 捺 (nà), one of the seven basic strokes, the lower right one in 永 (see pictures below).
Qianwei
砚 is not for stamp but holding ink. The green stone with a small carved animal on the top is for stamp, which is called seal 印(yìn).
I’m wodering whether there’s carved characters on the bottom of it yet?