Epilogue to Yellow Mountain

I looked at my finished Yellow Mountain painting and I felt something was amiss.  I did not get the fulfillment I was expecting.  It took me a little while to put a finger on what was happening.

I did not create enough separation between the mountain features to effuse the grandeur and vastness of this landscape.

Upon re-examination of my work, the impression was that this was a bird's-eye view of a mountain range.  I could have and should have widened the perspective of the features.  I should have utilized my 18 mm lens and picked a different vantage point to capture the true ambience.  Obviously this was not photography and it was too late to do anything.

Or was it?

To prove my theory, I begged the help of technology, Photoshop.

I digitally separated my painting into 3 distinct areas.  The foreground on the left, middle-ground would be the 4 peaks of the mountain and the trailing features painted with splash ink brushstroke would be the background.   Cloud and mist features would be an effective means for the separation.  They are voids that would not appear as omissions.

Immediately I felt the painting opened up and now inviting me to be immersed as a participant.

Since I could not push back the features in what should have been my middle-ground, I experimented with another trick.  I wanted to add some incidentals in front of the 4 peaks, thus effectively adding distance.

So birds were deployed.

I had to change the birds from black to white in front of the peaks to make them more conspicuous.  Call that creative freedom if one must.

Did this help the painting?

Yellow Mountain

Using my black and white sketch of Huangshan as a reference, I proceeded to paint a larger painting in color.  This painting shall have a pronounced yellow tone.  You might say that is the personality of this piece.

I loaded the right side of the painting with features and the left side relatively scant as a contrast.
The foreground would be allocated with more detailed brushstrokes, fading to the right and to the back.  This initial stage consisted mainly of the Gou and R'an (scribe and wash) portions of the Gou Chuen Ts'a R'an D'ian ( scribe, texture, rub, wash, dot ) process.

The mountains in the foreground is extended to the right and back, forming a S-shaped pattern.  This is to satisfy the prescribed requisite of  "level perspective" in the traditional sense of Chinese landscape painting.

Adding a light wash to the features allowed me to get a better perspective of what I was doing, especially when the paper was wet

After the wash had dried, I did my Chuen and T'sa (texture and rubbing) brushstrokes.  The painting began to take on a more realistic appearance due to the added information.

With the help of selective R'an (wash) brushstrokes, I was able to better reveal the 3-dimensional quality of the painting by depicting the different light values.

A close-up of the Gou, Chuen, T'sa, R'an process.  Notice the lack of D'ian (dotting) at this stage.  I typically would reserve that for the purpose of concealing bad lines and to add amorphous features to garnish the landscape.

The void expanse was tweaked with clouds and mist, basically a wet on wet technique to borrow from the watercolor vernacular.  The effects were exaggerated when wet.

I had a better sense of what the stage looked like after the cloud and mist dried.  I began adding more detailed incidental features to the landscape. 

This also involved the use of the D'ian brushstroke to ameliorate deficiencies in the painting;  to smooth out transitions from one value to another

There was prodigious use of D'ian (dotting) brushstroke in this painting.  This technique helped to conceal a lot of inadequacies in my brushstrokes and created a pleasant nuance.  If you looked closely and compared the before-and-after pictures of the same areas you would notice a lot of the tentative brushstrokes were well hidden now.  Perhaps this was pointillism in its infancy.  Wink, wink.  

Here is an example of how all the different brushstroke techniques worked together to form a cohesive feature, evolving from a purely two-dimensional drawing.

Time to stand back and give the painting a rest.  The wet paper made the painting very vivid.