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.

Project Water continued

Now that I had a chance to look at my water painting for a couple of weeks, I saw a major fault with the painting.  I showed too much detail in the dark areas and no details at all in the blue areas.  Instead of depicting contrast, a sunken feeling of imbalance was forged.

I know my motivation was curiosity, something to do, something to try so I should keep stoking that fire.  My first mental sketch was for something that is impressionistic, nondescript and yet able to present a clear image of the subject matter.  Perhaps I was trying to invent a Rorschach blot?   Could it be that I have a very misguided understanding of pointillism and was trying to adulterate that with my experimentation?

Time to throw logic to the wind and grab my brush and ameliorate the experiment.  Not the time to be pensive.

Basically I was writing in a lot more information, not only in the blue sections, but all over the paper.  I was juxtaposing my blue lines with my ink lines, hoping that as they intersect, some of the crossings would be serendipitous, creating those short lines that I was looking for in the first place.  I was so consumed by that process that I didn't want to  disrupt that rhythm by snapping a photo to document the progress.  Not even when I had to switch brushes.

So here's the new face, or phase, of my water project.