Time Drawn: Summer 2010
After taking a Chinese Painting class, I started experimenting with the techniques I’d learned in it.
One of those experiments was trying to paint other types of flowers in the Spontaneous style I’d learned, distilling them down to their essence and then putting that on the paper in a few strokes.
This was my most successful attempt.
It’s a set of lady slipper flowers, which have that odd “slipper” petal. Which, since it’s solidly a three-dimensional feature, is a bit tough to draw. I had to use variations in ink tone to get that look, which is far more difficult and easy to mess up than you’d think. Just imagine painting with two colors on your brush, trying not to mix them together too much.
The leaves aren’t that special, though I did like that I got some texture inside the leaves that matches the vein patterns of the real plant pretty well.
And the whole piece looks yellow because of a combination of the paper I used and the lighting I had (indoor lighting is yellow-tinted). I used newsprint, a large, cheap paper that is exactly the same as what you get in newspapers. For those who have never bought a newspaper, that means low-quality slightly course paper that tears easily. I used it because, well, it’s cheap, and it actually has the right level of bleed qualities that I like.
…Bleed quality means how far the ink/paint travels on the paper when you apply it. Some papers have no bleed, and a small wet drop of black ink stays in place. Others have a lot of bleed, and that drop will quadruple in size and gain fuzzy edges. High bleed papers are actually used a lot in Chinese painting, since that fuzziness gives you a lot of possibilities and all you need to do to get firm lines on the paper is use less water for the paint.
Heh, “all”, I say that as if it was easy.
