Chinese Ink Character Painting Techniques

Author: Shi Guoliang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features:
Ink and wash sketching is just one part of a student's character painting, requiring certain shaping skills and brushwork proficiency to proceed. You can practice more sketches, slow sketches, and memory sketches. Sketching helps you exercise your perception and quickly capture fleeting moments of life; slow sketching allows you to analyze, contemplate, and refine small, static figures with reason. Memory sketching cultivates your imagination and composition skills. To support and reinforce this training, you can frequently review and study sketches by artists such as Holbein, Ingres, Kandinsky, Menzel, Xu Beihong, Jiang Zhaohe, Huang Zhou, Lu Chen (early works), and Zhou Sicong (early works). Through extensive practice, your shaping skills will undoubtedly improve.
Since it is ink and wash character painting, it will inevitably involve traditional techniques such as brushwork and ink. These techniques are primarily acquired through copying. For example, copying calligraphy can help you appreciate the brushwork techniques of "three twists and turns," transitions, lifts, presses, and the metallic flavors of "drawing like sand" and "leaking like water marks." This will greatly benefit your future line drawing and brushwork.