The scroll on the home page opens with one cinnabar chop. Three were cut for this site. This is the bench they came from: the one still on the scroll, the one that moved to your home screen, the one that was retired, and the outlines under all of them.
The bench
一半春秋一筆冬夏
one half spring and autumn, one stroke winter and summer
引首章 leading seal · on the scroll
秦百川
Qin Baichuan
名章 name seal · your home screen icon
有容乃大
great because it holds much
闲章 leisure seal · retired
What each chop does
引首章 the leading seal
A hanging scroll opens with a leading seal at the head, on the right, before the first word. It is not a signature. It sets the mood or states a line, and it claims the empty paper at the top so the scroll does not start dead. This one states a sentence only its owner has a use for: how the name 秦百川 is built out of the four seasons. 春 spring lends its head and 秋 autumn its grain stalk to make 秦 Qin. 夏 summer sheds one stroke to leave 百 hundred. 冬 winter takes one more drop to become 川 river.
That trick lives in the modern script. In seal script the same characters share almost nothing, so the stone states the sentence and does not demonstrate it. A seal states words; it does not have to prove them.
名章 the name seal
The name seal is the signature. It goes at the end, beside the last words, where a painter signs. This one reads 秦百川, Qin Baichuan, cut as one full-height character on the right and two stacked on the left, the way a three-character name seal is laid out.
It was cut to answer the leading seal. The head poses the riddle, the signature solves it, and a reader who unrolled the whole scroll got the payoff at the bottom. That pairing lasted a few hours. The name seal came off the page the same day, and the brush stroke now closes the scroll alone. So the scroll poses its riddle and prints no answer. That is the intent, not an oversight. The cut is not gone: add this site to an iPhone home screen and it is the icon.
闲章 the leisure seal
A leisure seal carries a phrase, not a name. The first head chop on this site read 有容乃大, the second half of a line by Lin Zexu: the sea takes in a hundred rivers, and is great because it holds them. The first half carries the owner's given name, which is exactly what a leisure seal is for.
It was retired when the riddle replaced it. Anyone may stamp Lin Zexu's line. Nobody else has a use for the riddle, and a scroll carries only the chops it has a reason for. It is kept here because a seal book prints what was cut, not only what is still in use.
How a chop is cut
Start from the outline. Every character is a public-domain trace of its form in the Shuowen Jiezi, the first-century dictionary that fixed small seal script. Never from the modern shape: seal-script 秦 is two hands over a grain stalk and shares almost nothing with the 秦 you type. The first cut of the name seal was generated instead, and it shipped a 秦 that does not exist.
Fit the cell. A seal stretches each character to fill its box. The distortion is the style, not a fault.
Even the ink. Each character is thickened on its own until every cell carries the same mass, so a sparse 大 does not starve beside a dense 秦.
Cut the frame. Grid rules and a border go in, and the silhouette is roughened until it reads as stone, not as vector.
Wear it. A used stone loses bites from its border and its strokes, and that wear is in the cut already. The paste dial above thins the impression instead, the way a chop prints when the paste has not reached the paper evenly.
The outlines under the cuts
Fourteen small seal script forms, shown as the raw traces they were cut from, before any stretching, thickening or wear. On the stone each seal is read right column first, top to bottom.
Leading seal
一yī · one, cut twice
半bàn · half
春chūn · spring
秋qiū · autumn
筆bǐ · brush, stroke
冬dōng · winter
夏xià · summer
Name seal
秦qín · Qin
百bǎi · hundred
川chuān · river
Leisure seal
有yǒu · to have
容róng · to hold
乃nǎi · and so
大dà · great
Seal-script outlines: public-domain traces from Wikimedia Commons, redrawn from Richard Sears' Chinese Etymology at hanziyuan.net, which asks for this acknowledgement. 半 and 筆 were traced from the Chinese Text Project's seal rasters at ctext.org. The cuts, the frames and the wear are this site's own.