Freehand Landscape · Painting Mountains and Rocks

Author: Su Baoxi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features:
Mountains and rocks are one of the important components of traditional Chinese landscape painting. The technique of painting mountains and rocks is one of the most fundamental skills in traditional Chinese landscape painting. Since the emergence of landscape painting, landscape painters throughout the generations have created and accumulated an extremely rich variety of techniques for painting mountains and rocks through long-term practice of learning from nature and inheriting the painting experience of predecessors. They have summarized a complete set of theoretical and regulatory principles, forming a style that uses exaggerated and deformed techniques to shape the forms of mountains and rocks, and employs different forms of techniques to generalize the painting methods of various mountains, peaks, and ranges. Later generations have multiple names for different types of rubbing techniques based on different brushwork methods and natural characteristics. Rubbing techniques dominated by lines include the Mopan Rubbing, Jiesuo Rubbing, Heye Rubbing, Zhetai Rubing, and Yuntou Rubbing. Rubbing techniques dominated by surfaces include the Dafupi Rubbing, Mayajia Rubbing, and Tuonidai Shui Rubbing. Rubbing techniques dominated by dots include the Yudian Rubbing, Dandian Rubing, and Dingtou Rubbing. Beginners learning to paint mountains and rocks should first master analyzing the structural characteristics and yin-yang relationships of rocks. Generally speaking, southern landscape paintings feature abundant trees, often using techniques such as Mopan, Jiesuo, Midian, and Heye. Northern landscape paintings, on the other hand, have more rocks and fewer trees, frequently employing techniques like Dafupi, Yudian, Zhetai, Mayajia, and Tuonidai Shui. These principles are the accumulated experience of predecessors. When learning, one should not rigidly adhere to ancient methods but should instead combine natural laws, progress step by step, start with the simple and move to the complex, and practice repeatedly. Accumulate experience through practice and observe and feel more in nature, so that one can then have different forms of expression and creativity in both sketches and creations.