A Restarter's Toolkit — The Only Five Things to Buy First

Five Is Enough for the Toolkit

The question I hear most from adults who want to return to the brush is: what do I buy? Most people open a supply shop's site, start to add a twenty-piece starter set to the cart, and then stop at the price and the sheer number of items. I am always glad they stopped there.

To restart, you need five things. A brush, ink, something to hold the ink, paper, and something to weigh the paper down. With these you can write one character on a half-sheet. The water dropper, the practice pads, the second and third brushes bundled into the set can wait until your own hand asks for them. Buy the tools first and the buying itself becomes the satisfaction — and you end up not picking up the brush at all. I have watched this happen. The people whose lines are stiffest often have the most impressive equipment.

The Five, and How to Choose Each

The brush is the one thing worth buying new. A child's thin brush is usually too small for an adult hand. For block script on a half-sheet, one medium kengo brush — mixed soft and stiff hair, neither too limp nor too hard — with a tip four or five centimeters long is enough. It doesn't need to be expensive; the hand can't yet use a costly brush.

For ink, a single bottle of liquid ink is fine while you're restarting. This may surprise anyone who has read me insist that grinding a solid ink stick for three minutes is the true entrance to calligraphy. But the first wall in restarting isn't writing badly — it's not sitting down at the desk at all. So remove one barrier. Ink that pours ready to write returns the habit of writing to your body. The ink stick and stone are the next step, once writing has become routine again.

To hold the ink, you don't need a heavy stone — a light bokuchi, a lidded plastic ink dish, is enough. An inkstone is a tool right up until it's washed, wiped, and put away, and that chore is what makes day one hard to begin. Paper: cheap practice half-sheets, 24.3 by 33.3 centimeters. It's small enough that a ruined sheet costs nothing, which is exactly why the hand moves. To weigh the paper you need a paperweight and a felt underlay. Skip these and the paper slides, the line wavers, and you mistake it for your own clumsiness. They're there so you don't blame your arm for the tool's fault.

Two Things to Add Later

Once writing has come back, there are two tools worth adding. One is the solid ink stick and stone. The other is a slightly better brush.

I felt this myself. When I restarted after a stretch away, I wrote with liquid ink and whatever brush was around. One day, impatient because the lines wouldn't behave, I ground ink on a stone for the first time in a while — and as I ground it, I felt my hand settle before I'd written anything. For those few minutes, while the faintly sweet smell of animal glue rose, calligraphy had already begun, though not one stroke was down. Liquid ink had let me skip that run-up, and it turned out I needed it. So I recommend the solid ink stick not as the first thing you buy, but as the place you return to once you want to write.

Start with five, and add in the order your hand asks. On what you're actually returning to, see Coming Back to the Brush as an Adult; on choosing that first brush, How to Choose Your First Brush. What to gather is not an impressive toolkit, but the smallest set that lets you write one character today.