Optimal character composing for Chinese calligraphic artwork
Yiping Meng, Fan Tang, Weiming Dong, Xiaopeng Zhang · 2016
Chinese Calligraphy is a form of calligraphy widely practised in China and revered in the Chinese cultural sphere, including countries such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc.. The variation of characters in shape, size and shade is the key skill in creation of Chinese calligraphic artworks. Characters should be carefully designed and composed together to create an excellent artwork. Previous works usually focus on synthesizing new calligraphic characters of a specific style [Xia et al. 2013], reproducing the writing processes of Chinese calligraphic artworks [Yang et al. 2014], or animating the construction process of Chinese ink-wash paintings [Tang et al. 2014], instead of creating and optimizing new calligraphic artworks. In this work, we develop a data-driven framework to optimally compose multiple characters picked from a database to form a Chinese Calligraphic artwork (see Figure 1). Our system can automatically generate a calligraphy in the style of a specific calligrapher. Currently we focus on the adjustment of character sizes in an artwork and formulate the composing of characters as a Markov process. The understanding of art varies with people, so our objective is finding a reasonable solution that is plausible to an artist's creating style, instead of searching for the best composing result. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to optimize the creating process of Chinese calligraphic artworks.