Beaverton Creek (yellow)

The last Beaverton Creek painting done in green was very impressionistic.  I liked it enough to build a canvas frame for it so that I could mount it a la Xuan-Boo style.

In the mean time I want to try my hands on something a little less wild, but still Xieyi.  The image I conjured up was a landscape bathed in a golden light.  Beaverton Creek, yellow !

 back of  Xuan

Again I mapped the landscape on the back of my Xuan.  This  process allowed me more freedom to flick my brush.  I could then concentrate on building up the painting  on the front side of the paper.

front of Xuan

My first step was to add visible branches and tree trunks to the scene.  I punctuated the highlighted areas with tips of branches.  I was trying to achieve the effect which I discussed at my "Visual Acuity" blog.  It is important to extend the exposed tips and branches down, at least in appearance, if not in physicality.  There is a saying in Chinese brush   "bi duan yi lian", meaning the  brush trek is broken up, but the meaning (spirit) still connects.  Sort of like driving down the freeway and using the dotted line to inform you of the virtual divide.  The extraneous branches and stems could be blended in very nicely with the split hair technique.

 

 

A few contour lines and hemp chuen  took care of the foreground, transforming a patch of grey into a bank with rocks and texture.

Looking at the rough draft, I noticed a white right triangle sticking out at the lower right quadrant of the painting.  Somehow there was a white line forming a vivid hypotenuse with the white branches.  This is most awful; especially when you are now aware of this flaw.

My remedy was to fill in the hypotenuse and turn it into a contour line.  I now have a more defined shore lobe extending into the water.

Right now this lobe seemed a little awkward, but I better stop now before I commit some knee-jerk changes.

You Bad Bird !

I was just doodling with my brush, no doubt inspired by the Mi Fu tie that I re-discovered amongst my pile of paper.  I was trying to do calligraphy ostensibly, but I was just going through the motions.  After all I didn't even have the right ink.

I noticed that my scribbling had permeated through the top paper to the second layer beneath it.  The blotches left on the second layer was interesting to me.  I could tell that they were characters of some sort but there wasn't enough information to fill in the voids to give them any meaning.

 

Sort of remind me of a half erased chalk board during my grade school years.  For some reason I thought of my "Fortune Birds" painting. 

The bird on the right is the teacher, trying to educate a bunch of subdued, disciplined pupils.   All except for the  one on the far left; the one that is distracted by something.

Ah that could have been me.  Bad Bird !!

Painting On Turned Wood

A friend of mine turns wood as a hobby and gave me a turned vase for the heck of it.  He had applied a coat of sealer on it (the purple coat in the picture).  It offered me a new playground.

I brushed on 3 coats of white gesso, allowing each coat to dry before the next application.  I mixed in some custom lime green color on the final coat to give it a very light greenish hue, reminding me of an Araucana chicken egg shell.

After smoothing out the brush marks by sanding, I painted a few shrimps on the vase.  I made this work "legit" by painting my chop on it, since a flat seal  would not go on a curved surface.  The entire surface was then sealed with urethane from a spray can.

The result was pleasing, I thought.