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Illustrator How-To: Creating Your own Chop by G. H. Cloutier In Western culture, it’s common for an artist to sign or initial her name on pieces of original artwork. In Eastern culture, specifically Chinese, it’s customary for an artist to create a chop, an identifying symbol. |
Traditional vs. Non-Traditional Depending on what sort of person you are, you may be interested in creating a more traditional Chinese chop with Chinese characters or perhaps just a design that’s representative of you.
Translate Accurately There’s a Web site that can help you generate the meaning of your name in sounds. To try it out, go to www.mandarintools.com. Here, you can enter your name and the site will generate a Chinese name that sounds as close as possible. As an alternative, you may want to seek out characters for words that have particular meaning to you. One way to do this is with sites like www.zhongwen.com, which is an excellent English-to-Chinese dictionary graphically represented online. You can simply enter words that are significant to you and you’ll be presented with the symbols, which you can then re-create in Illustrator. But I’m not Chinese. You may not want Chinese characters in the seals simply because you feel no connection to them. Your design can simply be a design that’s symbolic for you, like your initials. In figure 2, you can see a signature created from simple lines and then how it was extrapolated it to a simple design. |
Color. A chop is traditionally Chinese chop is red. You can choose a color that symbolized you.
Chop Materials Chinese chops are usually carved out of soapstone or jade and then a durable red ink paste is used for stamping. One thing to keep in mind for this sort of work is how thin your lines are. You might have to worry about excess ink causing the lines to fill in. Figure 5 shows our chop made into a stamp. |
Signature Design Chop Example
This is my brainstorming practice using my signature. After writing my signature, I looked for major shapes and lines that appear in my writing style. Simplification is key to the design. Remember the final product doesn't need to resemble writing. It is a design. After several combinations, I came up with 3 designs that I like (see the 3 purple designs on the bottom write of the paper). |