In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to animate the brush-writing process of Chinese calligraphy characters of regular style. It mainly includes three steps: stroke extraction, trajectory extraction and brush-writing animation of strokes. The key idea is, for a given character, to determine the quantitative values of animating parameters for the brush-writing control points on its trajectory, based on the character shape and the qualitative expert knowledge of calligraphy. "Yan Kai" is used as a case study, which is one of the most famous four classic regular styles, from "Qin Li Tablet". Therefore, this work can help people to learn and appreciate Chinese calligraphy through computers. © 2009 IEEE.