Preview | Chinese Watercolor Techniques: Painting Animals with Lian Quan Zhen

Hi, welcome. My name is Lien Zhen. Today we are looking at both Chinese painting and watercolor paintings, painting animals. I started painting when I was very young, about 10 years old. First Chinese painting, I like it, later watercolor, I love it too. Today when I paint, I combine both Chinese painting and watercolor painting techniques to create beautiful effects. So let's start with learning Chinese painting. The exercise we are going to do, we only need three simple materials. This is a simple Chinese brush, brown color, it's made out of wolf hair. The second material we need is the ink, bottle ink. The third material is a small piece of rough rice paper, it's also called rough shun paper. To do this exercise, which is very simple, you get some water with your brush, pick up some ink at the tip of the brush. So right now, your brush has dark ink, lighter ink, and lighter and lighter toward the heel. There's no, actually there's no ink on the heel. You hold your brush with two fingers approximately at the center part, and then close the other three fingers, put it in the back. So you hold your brush very firm. When you hold your brush straight, it's called center brush. Sideway, it's called side brush, very simple. So holding the brush sideways, you can make brush strokes like this. You see, the ink from dark to light and light, light, no ink. And also you create some rough textures. You use this to create some rough texture objects, such as tree trunks, rocks, probably some of the skin of animals. The second kind of brush stroke is called center brush stroke. You hold your brush center, straight, and start painting like this. Or you can move from left to right. So with these brush strokes, you can have full, soft effect, not like the rough effect like this. Now, let's use brush to create more brush strokes. Brush strokes is very important in Chinese painting. It suggests objects, suggests textures. Okay, let's use the same brush, get some ink on the tip of the brush. First, let's use side brush to create some leaves, let's say orchid leaves. So when you're moving, when you move your brush, you can, you should keep it fluid, not going like little chunk by little chunk when you paint the brush strokes. You go all the way, probably smaller, lighter at the beginning, press down a little bit more, and then also lift up your brush a little bit more at the end. Now, use center brush strokes doing some exercise, create some long brush strokes like this. See, painting an orchid, you can use both brush strokes. Next, we are going to use the both side brush and center brush strokes to create a fish. Get some water with your brush, and then get the ink at the tip area, and the ink will blend a little bit into middle, but no ink at the heel. One brush strokes, you get a body of the fish, that's a side brush. And then, center brush, hold your brush straight, see this is a body of fish. Get a little bit more ink, side brush stroke, get a tail. The tail is out of paper, it's all right. Now, get dark ink, paint the head of the fish, and same also, paint the dorsal fin, the other fins. Now, paint the eye, if you need very dark ink, pupil, and the gill. If you want a little texture on the body, you can get some darker ink to put it there, while still wet. Here, we create a fish.