How to use traditional color for Chinese Painting

Hi everybody, I'm Kate Wu. Welcome to my channel. Today I'm going to share with you the colors that I've been using for all of my paintings. Other than ink, I only use four colors. Red, orange, yellow, and blue. These are the traditional colors in block form. They are made with plants, minerals, and other raw materials. This is the five gram scarlet red color. When you open it, it comes with a plastic bag with blocks. You don't have to use them all in one go. You can just add to it as you run out of color. The good thing about the traditional Chinese color blocks is that you can keep it for a very long time. Look, and this is 2007. To get the color out, you just have to drip some water onto it and wait for about a few minutes before you can start painting. And after you're done, you just have to let it dry and put it aside. You don't have to wash it at all. So for the next time, you just have to add some more water and then to get the color out again. It's very convenient and very environmental-friendly. You don't have to wash them away. Now let me show you what they look like. The scarlet and red, the orange, the prime yellow, and blue. Now I'm going to show you how to paint with mixed colors. For the tulips, I will use yellow and a bit of orange. As you can see, I will get two colors on my brush and just paint with one stroke to get the gradation. Freestyle painting is about simplicity, using fewer strokes to paint an object. While it looks simple and easy, the hardest part is that you cannot correct strokes. You can finesse it slightly, but not to paint over again because you just can't. The first stroke will still be shown through after it is dried. The stems are green, so you just mix the yellow with blue to get a green. Hold the brush upright to get an even stroke. I like to paint a bird with brown color, so I get some orange and mix it with a bit of pink to get brown. The bird may be a bit advanced for beginners, but you may see how I paint with simple colors and use the same brush for all the strokes. So make sure that you always keep your brush pointy for finer strokes and manipulate the brush to get different paint effects. The names of the color pigments that I use are written in the description of this video. There are different brands and the colors are available in two forms, but I still prefer to use these traditional pigment blocks. I will be sharing more techniques in some other videos, so please subscribe to my channel. I will be posting every week. Thank you for watching. See you next time.