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My previous question wasn't great, but I didn't want to ask this question without being sure that the kanji below the blue line is 会, but I'm assuming that it is.

Example

In the above example, I've circled the parts that seem to be completely superfluous in blue, and in green I drew what I felt was the most natural flow between the strokes. Obviously calligraphy is supposed to be artistic/stylised but is it reasonable to just add extra strokes? The vertical stroke between ニ seems to be an extra stroke after 4th (judging by the flick upwards on the bottom stroke of ニ), and it seems to be connected to the bottom part. The ム seems almost to be reversed in how it's written, with some additional parts.

On the other hand, most calligraphy I've seen (including the 極真 above) seem to be much more faithful to stroke flow/direction. Is this just an outlier or is it expected that calligraphy takes such liberties in how kanji are written?

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    That's quite simply 会. See moji.tekkai.com/zoom/%E4%BC%9A/page.html for a variety of ways of writing it.
    – virmaior
    Aug 13, 2016 at 18:52
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    In the future, please refrain from changing the question into a completely different one. There's nothing more annoying than writing a long, juicy answer, feeling all good about yourself as you're hovering over the "Post Your Answer" button, but then boom! Everything you wrote has become instantly invalidated.
    – Blavius
    Aug 13, 2016 at 22:19
  • @Blavius Fair enough. It didn't have many views so I didn't think it would matter much.
    – user1624
    Aug 13, 2016 at 23:20
  • Well, you never know, I guess. No worries though :)
    – Blavius
    Aug 14, 2016 at 3:23

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Depending on the style of calligraphy, creative liberties may be taken, and the stroke rules aren't as iron-clad as people like to think. But in this particular case, the reason the final character looks quite different from your expectations is that it's actually closer to the older form that 会 replaced: 會. (You will see this character towards the bottom of the link virmaior posted.)

To be specific: the first stroke across corresponds to the line directly below the angled "roof." The next stroke across and vertical stroke going down corresponds to the "eyes." And the spiral below that corresponds to the 日, a slightly stylized take on a very common way to draw a 日 at the base of a character which itself derives pretty clearly from the standard stroke order.

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  • Thanks, I didn't consider looking at it from the perspective of the 旧字体, that makes it seem a lot more like what I would expect of calligraphic interpretation.
    – user1624
    Aug 14, 2016 at 11:16

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