I painted a horse last year to welcome the year of the horse. The guest of honor this year is the ram.
I've been entertaining the thought of doing a painting for a ram. This is not a subject that I've painted before so it would be fresh. Luck would have it that I've been invited to do a couple of painting demos for school children, to honor Chinese New Year. I'll have added incentive now to research my subject and embark on the painting, except the stakes are higher now. I have to actually show that I could paint.
I seemed to have developed an affinity for phthalocyanine Blue. That was the first color I reached for. I sketched out a couple of rams in my scrapbook.
My emphasis will be on the posture. The way the ram holds the head defines the painting. However, I don't want to skim over the details of the facial features. Perhaps I could paint a ram with attitude, if somehow I can grasp the expressions.
This is where I was having tons of problems. Was I painting dogs.
How did the saying go; if you never made a mistake, then you've never tried. After my incessant
giggling stopped, I began to analyse my mistakes.
The snout was too pointed. I needed to make it thicker.
Time to get down to basics. Stop being a cowboy. I actually started to identify the components of a ram's snout. I was sketching with a mission now. The way I work around the problem was by creating a cylinder for the snout. I could therefore control the diameter of the cylinder and made sure it didn't turn into a cone!
I also reached back to my high school days, when I was sketching animal skulls. I do remember the strong mandibles of herbivores so their molars could grind up the grass they eat.
Feeling a little more reassured, I tried my sketching again.
I decided to break down the painting process into discrete steps. Normally I am dead set against it.
I've met too many students and colleagues who would shy away from painting something just because they've never "learned" how to paint it. I believe the fault lies in the system of rote learning.
We were taught to paint by memory, and not by observation. It is my assertion that all these "How to Paint" books actually do more harm than good. We become limited to, and by, these so called steps and this explains why most Chinese brush paintings look alike.
I suppose this is not the time to stay on my high horse. I need to show high school kids how to paint a ram with a Chinese brush, within an allotted time frame. Breaking the ram painting into discrete steps is the only way to get through it.
I would start out by painting the nose and the lips (steps 1 and 2). This is followed by the 2 circles forming the two ends of the cylinder, or snout (steps 3 and 4). Then we paint in the eyes, ears and the horns, and they all contribute to the spirit of the animal. Finally how the ram carries itself, i.e. the neck and the limbs, speaks to the body language of the animal.
It's time to make it bold. I (the ram) mean business.
