I was showing a beginner how to paint bamboo. This person painted quite a few vertical stalks of bamboo, consequently a lot of them crossed each other, and the painting looks like a wire mesh (exaggeration)!
The remedy is to control the angle where the stems intersect. Make those angles acute, and as far away from 90 degrees as possible. Another remedy would be to hide the point of convergence with leaves.
I then used my Blue Heron painting as an example. The blades of grass are bound to intersect with each other. What I did was to deliberately wet that juncture with water to cause the ink to bleed. The diffused ink helps to soften those corners.
To show the effect without the diffused ink, I used "PAINT" program to erase the bleeding ( I don't know how to Photoshop that out). Hopefully you would agree with me that the one with the bled ink looks better.
I then totally erased the grass to see what the painting would present itself............................ well, what do you think?
I am an enthusiast of Chinese Brush Painting and I would like to share my trials and tribulations in learning the craft. I want to document the process, the inspiration and the weird ideas behind my projects and to address some of the nuances related to this dicipline. I hope to create a dialogue and stir up some interest in the art of painting with a Chinese brush on Xuan. In any case, it would be interesting to see my own evolution as time progresses. This is my journal
Monday, September 27, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Ghosts From Yesteryears
I decided to clean out my pigsty in preparation for the upcoming Portland Open Studios tour and came across some stashed away Opus Magnums from my past. Oh my gosh these were done in 2003. I remembered buying a box of water color tubes out of the blue and a booklet of papers and ventured into the world of painting. It appeared that I made no attempts to mix the colors, not surprising since I did not have a color pallet. It almost seemed like I painted straight out of the tubes. Interestingly I was using aluminium foil as a surface for mixing colors when I first took lessons.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Calligraphy and Painting
There are people who asserted that calligraphy is the basis for all Chinese brush work, including brush painting. For me, this statement is quite true, especially now that I am attempting to teach people how to paint with a Chinese brush.
I had done some form studies on heron, and I've decided on adding calligraphy to them. The calligraphy will be used not in a narrative sense, i.e. telling a story about the herons, nor is it a poem about herons, but is used as a complementary tool to inspire and to augment the form of the heron.
In this work, the calligraphy which is in the cursive style is done as a very faint background, so as not to distract from the main pictorial outlay, but its subtleties help to bring out the dance form of the herons. Notice the single leg stance of one, and the ballerina like stance of the other. The motion and energy of the main characters are derived from the calligraphy, and vice versa.
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