Exploiting Shadows

My mission all along is not only to paint a rat to celebrate the lunar new year, but also to make the painting interesting.  I try to paint a posture that suggests movement.

I examined my painting at this stage and I was not unhappy with my work.  In fact I was quite pleased.  It thought I had captured the essence that I set out to do.

But something was amiss.

It looked too much like a painting, as if that was a bad thing.

I needed to inject a smidgen of realism into my painting.

I recalled that when I did my Shadows painting, I cut out paper silhouettes of the lady and her dog and casted shadows with them.  That method worked well to integrate their shadows into my painting of tree shadows.  I reached for this scheme again from my bag of tricks.

I fashioned the head of my rat out of aluminum foil, making it the same size as the painted image.  I then placed this impromptu wad onto my rat and casted a shadow with my desk lamp.

I tried a different angle with my lamp

I preferred the orientation of the second try.  I liked the more cohesive and less intrusive shadow from this angle.  So this is going to be the blueprint for my rat's shadow.

Immediately I could see the separation of the rat's head from the paper. I was absolutely elated.  I was this kid in a toy store.  I gleefully wrote in the whiskers.  Now my Rat is complete.

So why not make the entire landscape, the red square and all, three dimensional?

A judicious thin ink brushstroke just outside the bottom margins of the red square created the illusion of the red square being lifted from my Xuan.  Ah man, this is too much!  This was way beyond my imagination.  I personally thought the resulting realism was stunning.

The impulse to showcase this work was so immense that I wasted no time in buying my clear plastic panes and poplar planks and began my mounting and framing process.  I was motivated, to say the least.

Here is the finished product.

So here begs the question by some of my critics.  Chinese brush painting is supposed to be two dimensional and sort of impressionistic.  What I have done is not Chinese brush painting.

So what IS Chinese brush painting?