Mountain ridges, the background

Having completed the foreground and middle ground of my classical landscape, I am set for putting in the last player, namely, the background of the landscape.  I am also keenly aware that I still need to fulfill the "height perspective" of a classical landscape.  I need to have something soaring into the heavens.

For this exercise, I am sticking with a safe and seasoned player; mountain ridges.

Mountain ridges, or tops are common and standard features in a classical landscape painting.  In Chinese painting we will typically see a succession of hilltops, forming a mountain range.  I have alluded to this style of interpretation before, equating that to slicing up a potato into many pieces; each piece represents one vertical slice of the mountain.  When we arrange these slices of varying shape and height like pieces of domino tiles, we get to reconstruct the shape and volume of the mountain.

The picture below shows cardboard slices of a "mountain" that I used to help my students visualize a mountain when I was teaching landscape painting.

For my particular painting, I am using these slices from my inventory of shapes for my mountain,

This helps a person to visualize my mountain; my mannequin so to speak.

Typically I would lay down the contour lines of each "slice" of the mountain first.  For this painting however, I just pencil in the approximate position of the mountain and just splash down my individual slices, believing that this would result in a less rigid form.

After the paper dries to touch, I write in the contour lines of the individual slices.

And garnish my slopes with hemp fiber chuen, a technique used to add texture and further describe the topographic details of the landscape.

Shading helps to define the three dimensional structure of the mountain.

The top of these ridges are garnished with hints of shrubs and trees to add interest.

These decorative brushstrokes also serve the function of diverting the viewer's attention from the top dead center of the ridges.  In my haste of laying down the individual slices of the mountain, I committed the sin of lining up the apexes of the tops, forming a straight line towards the top.  By planting my shrubs and trees on some of the flanks of the mountain helps to create an illusion that the ridge tops form a curved and crooked line, which is more interesting and natural.  

Keeping in mind the requirement for depth perspective, which is to narrate a story or association of front and back, I am building a few simple shacks in this background.  

Thus it is plausible now, that people from these humble dwellings could perhaps visit the Ci En Pagoda, the waterfall, and walk alongside the path that sits at the bottom of a straight cliff with a platform on top, trek through the mixed woods and finally arriving at the temple in the foreground.  I trust this should satisfy the depth perspective.

To jazz up my "classical" landscape, I am going to emulate Zhang Daqian by brushing in some bold phthalocyanine blue.  Legend has it that Zhang would use a bowl to splash this bold and vivid color onto a huge painting painted on a enormous sheet of silk brocade, and his apprentices would help him lift the brocade to direct the liquid to flow to the strategic parts of the painting on that piece of silk cloth. 

I might be rushing things a little but I am eager to see what the final dimensions would be after cropping and mounting my painting.  I still have no idea whether I shall frame this painting the conventional way or mount it on canvas or board and then build a frame to house it.