Young Talents

I've been offered another opportunity to share the joy of painting a rooster with a young audience, as part of the Chinese New Year celebratory program.  I felt that I had developed a fluency with my method and since I already had the necessary material, then why not?

I managed to capture some of the paintings for sharing:

A heartwarming experience indeed !

And, no, I didn't find any dragon-moms!

Rooster Painting at Cultural Fair

I showed how to paint a rooster in my last blog, and I am happy to report that the scheme worked!

This is what the venue looked like

Here are a few of the examples of the day's work

I honestly don't know who's more happy, me or the participants.

Demonstrating Rooster Painting

My rooster painting caught the attention of a few organizations and they have asked me to do some demo sessions for them, as part of the Chinese New Year celebration.

One of the organization is putting up a Cultural Fair and I was invited to man a booth to show people how to paint a rooster.

I entertained the original proposal of painting a rooster for the visitors as they drop by my booth and rejected that idea rather quickly.   I didn't want to be a face-painting-ish event for me.   Not that I have anything against people who do face paintings, but I had the vision of being a tutor who will show people how to paint a rooster.  I envisioned that visitors would have some hands on experience and paint their own roosters, and get to keep them as their own painting.  I wanted a participatory venture.   I wanted people to share the joy of painting and the satisfaction of making a painting, regardless of whether they know how to paint or not.

For this I need to devise a fail safe method.  One that would work for 6 years old, as well as 60 years old.

I created a whole bunch of stencils, such that visitors could trace these templates onto their drawing paper.

The stencil ensures a basic shape for the visitor to start out with their painting, and takes away the apprehension that associates with many first-timers.

A traced outline from the stencil

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to use just ink and a single color red for the rooster.  Red is essential because it is the auspicious color in our culture.  We can't celebrate a new year with the color red.
First order after establishing the basic outline is to add in the beak and the eye.

Now paint in the neck feather

Now load the brush with ample water and ink and write in the feathers on the chest and body using discrete dabs

Write in the leg

Complete the toes and the leg in the back which is curled up

Tie in the leg to the body with additional brush dabs

Write in the big rooster feathers

Using red color, begin to write in the comb

Completed rooster with wattles, ear lobe and face.

I shall be putting this to practice pretty soon.