Sunrise at Huangshan

I recently took a trip to Singapore.  I wanted to experience Lau Pa Sat (old market) and I wasn't disappointed at all.  But that is not the reason for writing this blog.

As I was packed in the middle isle in the back of the belly of a 777, I pretty much had no vantage point of the view outside of the plane.  Well the blinds were all closed anyways so the passengers could spill "Z"s at 40K feet.  So I wasn't missing much. Then one of the passengers sitting by a window raised the window blind.  The cabin was immediately bathed with a streak of reddish amber light, arcing across the walls of the dimmed economy class holding pen, as the plane floats across the thin air.  

The sun was rising.

I stretched my neck and yawed my head, trying to maintain a line of sight to the rising sun outside the window, sidestepping the dark silhouettes of passengers' heads.  I was trying to absorb that image as much as I could.  I know it would be futile for me to take a picture with my phone, I would probably end up with a little amber oval amidst a dark field of heads.  The glow was so encompassing, I felt its presence more than simply seeing it.  

I found my old "run of the mill" piece of Huangshan after I returned home.  A piece that I did years ago, honing my painting skill.  I wanted to revive that painting by making the sun come up from behind those rock formations.

Yes, that encounter with the rising sun from inside a plane had done something to my psyche.  

Normally a painting done on Xuan paper is not meant to be painted over.  Fortunately I was toying with different ways to present paintings done on paper, I mounted my painting on cement board.  I also coated it with a gel medium to protect the surface, since I intended to display that without a glass cover.

That meant I could paint over my original work.  What a novel idea !  (I am sure oil painters do that all the time?)

I started out by "softening" the scene by accentuating the cloud and mist to make the painting less "rigid".

Then I added the sun, with its rays; as any textbook would have shown.

It looked OK, but something was missing.  I didn't "feel" it.  Perhaps it was too "storybook" like.  Too much like a page of illustration.  Who Knows.  I was just having a soliloquy.  Mumbling, actually.

Somehow I thought of Photoshop, a tool that I often use with my photography.  "Layers" to be specific.

What if I created a layer of the rising sun and superimpose that on the original painting.  Hmmmmmmm.

There's only one way to find out.

First I needed to see the effect of a piece of cicada skin Xuan superimposed on my painting.  I needed to know the degree of transparency I was dealt with.  Unlike Photoshop, I would not be able to adjust the transparency of my "layers" here.

Satisfied that the cicada skin Xuan was transparent enough to not totally obscure the painting underneath, I began to prepare my layer for the sun.

Before putting my feet to the fire, I did a dry run.  I took a picture of the top layer "sun" and superimposed it onto my bottom layer of the original painting.

This might actually work!

 

Painting the blues

Now that I have the entire painting sketched in, and my basic chuen brushstrokes and light values established, I can concentrate on the task of coloring.  

The painting pays homage to Red Cliffs, so I am dedicating the right side of the painting to the red cliffs; since that portion of the landscape is facing the audience, so making those cliffs red would be more fitting for the title.

I am going to start with the left side of the painting.  This is the shore across from the red cliffs alongside the river.  My choice of color be something along the bluish line.  In painting I am always reminded of the relationship among the different parts of the painting; how they contrast or support each other.  I am not sure if there's the concept of color wheel in classical Chinese painting and I might be out of place by saying that the application of color wheel is a strictly a western practice but I think it serves my purpose in this case.  I've not attended art school or anything, all I know is that colors on opposite sides of the color wheel are complementary color combinations and they tend to be more dramatic.  Drama is what I want in this painting!  Since I am not using a pure red I suppose I can fudge a little by not using a pure green.  I decide to use blue and green as my complimentary color to "reddish" for this part of the painting. 

I am also continuing to explore the coloring from the back of the Xuan paper method.  The paper I am using is sufficiently thin and translucent for the color to come through from the backside of the paper.  The advantage of coloring from the back is the presentation is more subdued, and it allows for more transparency for subsequent application of color on the top side.  In a way it resembles working with layers or masks in photoshop and not so much with mixing colors in a dish.

The darker areas of the red cliffs also receive a layer of blue color applied from the back of the paper.

This is how everything appears from the top side of the Xuan paper,

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?

Beaverton Creek (classic) completion

I know I have done a "what if" scenario by painting in pink leaves/flowers on the trees in the foreground using Photoshop; but that was before most of the incidentals were painted in and colored.
Now that I could see the finish line, I'm having second thoughts.

I am leery that pink might be too flashy.

There's only one way to find out.  I painted a couple of test swatches, one in pink and the other Blue Hue Three.

 

The blue looked nice and seemed to blend in well with the rest of the scenery.  Hence the problem.  It blended in too well and the painting looked ....uninviting.

The pink was uplifting and definitely grabbed my attention.  It worked well as a punctuation mark!  Now the fat lady sings!

 pink it is

 

The objects in the near ground were done mostly "boned"; with outline to give them a more defined, crisp footprint.  I tried to create the sense of a diverse and mixed shrubbery by punching up the color palette and painting in leaves of various species; avoiding the sense of total chaos at the same time.  Fortunately I've been to this place a hundred times and I had a pretty good idea in my head.  As one travels further back into the painting, the images became "boneless", edges were not well defined, and the color became more monochromatic.  I actually employed alum solution to help create the white margins around tree trunks.  This worked particularly well for objects in the distance, where a dark outline would be too crisp for the purpose and should be avoided.   I suppose I would call this alum technique as a "soft bone" technique.  Obviously this required planning;  the tree trunks were among the first items to be painted with alum.

The bamboo areas in the left midriff portion seemed a little flat.  I tried to paint in a few more leaves but that looked really cluttered and was concealing my brushstrokes, so I backed off.  I settled on selectively darkening certain areas to give it a lumpy look, to get  more depth in that cluster.

 bamboo treatment

The creek still looked too open ended for me.  I would like the bottom part to close off some more.  I also wanted to warm up the foreground somewhat, to subtly draw it out further from the background.  Harking back to Photoshop tricks, I decided to add a warming filter by painting a very diluted  and light yellow color over the lower half of the landscape, and the bottom end of the creek.  I was hoping the slight yellow tint on the water might work as a gradient tool to help narrow the creek somewhat.

 warming filter

 

I wish there is a way to retain this wet look.  There is so much more depth to everything.  Images just want to jump off the Xuan.

I decided to add a few ducks to this painting, or rather, to move them to different coves as compared with the original draft.   It seems like I couldn't do a painting anymore without adding a bird or heron or something.  In this case, that's what Beaverton Creek is all about.  A nature park in a city.

 ducks added

 

One of the things I like about this painting is that there are so many points of interest in it.

It invites you to explore each little snippet, to "read" the painting, as Chinese would say.

Some of these sections could stand in as a complete painting in its own right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I need to hang this up now and  glance at it occasionally.  I'm sure something will come up for me to make corrections.