Chinese Fine Line Painting Lesson - Butterfly & Lantern Hibiscus Inspired by Yu Chung-lin

Hello, this is Ling Qi, brush painting for beginners from Oriental Art Supply. The subject is a fine line. The flower is lantern or coral hibiscus. There's two ways of saying this in translation from Chinese, and with butterfly. And the reference I did was Yu Zhonglin's fine line fan-shaped book. I used quite a bit of his patterns that he has a lot of butterfly. And then I didn't particularly like his lantern hibiscus. So I used Ning Yi's book three, 108 flowers. In there, I like Ning's structure of the hibiscus. So I used the fine line technique, did the flower. And then the butterfly, I used Yu's book. I also did some time ago, a booklet that in the Oriental Art Supply website, you can find on the butterfly. So on the right is the fine line style. So these are the reference books that I use. So you can see that you don't have to copy everything from one book. You can find what you like from one artist's work and piece it together with another artist's work. And then you can also do it in both fine line and xieyi style the way you want it. So the difference is the technique is very different. The material is different. We will do some introduction today on both the materials and then the style, the technique. The paper I'm using is our student grade fine line paper called glass. And it's a thin paper, but highly sized. So we can use the technique that we need for fine line. And then the brush I'm using is baby breath and medium soft, fine soft and small red feather for line. So those are the three brushes I'm using. And the two, the baby breath I used to apply the color and then the medium fine soft, I use it to pull the color. So for beginners, I would suggest you to use pencil or heavy ink to do a draft like this. If you are advanced artists that are easily comfortable with drawing, then you can freehand. But for beginners, I would suggest you to do this and put underneath your paper and trace it over. So you only have to worry about the lines, the strokes versus the pattern of your composition. So I'm going to show you how do I use this to do the line. The line work, I will use a watery medium ink. And then I'm going to have some heavy ink for the area of the body of the butterfly. So I might not do the whole thing, but I want to show you the most important part. So I leave the flower without doing any line work because that's what I will call another style of fine line called boneless. So there's no outline. And I will show it to you after we get there. So to start with, I will show you how I do the first leaf. So I have heavy and light and lift. So I do pressure and I reduce the pressure and I do the center and this leaf thing. So this is the line work of the leaves and then the branches or the the stamen to connect the flower, just simple straight line. And then I would do a little mark for the calyx of the flower. And then the rest of the leaves in the same way you can repeat. And then we are going to do the star of the butterfly. I will do the whole thing. So I'm going to do the the wing of the butterfly first. Then I'm going to go to the dark ink to do the body of the butterfly straight. Even though the paper is not very precise, so it doesn't run, but it's still important not to have too much moisture. Okay, then I finish my butterfly. And there are some accents of the butterfly of the wings. I'm going to make dark. So this is just simply drawing. And this is for dark. Okay, this I show you all the line work is involved on this particular. So you'll finish the rest like that. So then I have one I already did ahead of time. Like this one. So okay, then I'm going to show you the dark leaves of this particular composition. So this is the first leaf I'm going to do. So there are three layers. The fine line sometimes can go as high as seven or eight or nine layers. So I'm just showing you the very simple version so you can apply it according to how intense you want your work is. So the first thing is I'm going to do the first layer, which is the ink. So the second layer. Can you explain what you're doing with the two brushes? Yes, I'm using the baby breath to apply the medium ink to the area. And then I use a clean brush, which is my soft, medium fine soft to pull the edge so it's fading it away. And I also leave this little line area so I don't feel the whole thing. The reason I do that so I can achieve the dimension. So make it more three dimensional. If you feel the whole thing, then it becomes one dimension. So this is one side and then you do the same on the other side. So right now there is we got a lot of inquiry in the Europe. They are doing wallpaper and similar style. So if you are interested, check that out the same style. So this is the first layer of this leaf on this particular leaf have three layers. The first layer is indigo and no, I'm sorry, ink, indigo and green. And so now I have another sample here that I did. This is a darker ink application. This is a lighter ink. So the next layer, I'm going to do you each layer. You have to wait until completely dry. And then also the color is very important. It's watering. It's nothing like you want it. So this one that I did the indigo. So then after the ink dry and I apply the indigo. So the second layer is the indigo. The first layer is ink. The second layer is indigo. And on this particular leaf is a lighter leaf. So I did the first layer with indigo and this is a baby leaf. So I did the first layer with the green. Then I'm going to show you what I do on the second layer. So then I start using the light, the green watery mixture and I just apply the whole thing. I no longer do section at a time. You can see the white area I have left in early time and shows that dimension. On the baby leaf, my second layer is yellow and I use the fine, soft, medium to pull the color to the tip. And I didn't put all the way the end of the tip because I'm going to use the red feathers small to do a little bit red on the tip. This is a dark red. So I have one here that this is ink and indigo already done on this particular leaf. So I'm going to do the third layer, which is the green. So I'm going to, so I usually call this cover. So no longer pulling, I'm just cover the whole thing. The statement just straight green. All right. And then now I'm going to show you how to do the coral hibiscus or lantern hibiscus. So I'm using the baby breath brush. I'm using a little bit tip with the vermilion and then red. So you can see the color puddles. How do I make it un-puddle? Then I use the other brush to pull it. And then I'm using the same brush to feather out the rest of the flower. So whenever I petal, I will pull it down and then I'm using a darker red, which is my rouge color. And then to do the structure of the flower. All right. And then I'm going to back with my baby breath brush. So you can see that each stroke I'm lifting it up so it doesn't puddle. But if for any reason at the beginning you are too wet, then you can always use the medium salt to kind of hold the color away. Okay. So now I'm using the darker red, the bright red with rouge. Now I'm going to. So what they, this call is called boneless, boneless skill of fine line. You can see that I don't have any line outline work like the leaves and the butterfly. So, so make sure that every stroke you put it off, you lift it up, then you don't puddle it up. So you don't need to use the other brush to, to pull it. But if for any reason you are not able to stop puddled up, then you can also use the other brush to clean it up. So I, this is red and rouge. So then I use the red feather, small with vermilion with a little red into the, to the bow, little dot, happy dots with the center of the flower. So on this side is the flower bud. So I'm using vermilion with red add a little bit darker to show the dimension. So then for the stamen, I use green with red feathers, small and indigo. So then I use a green to do the whole. So this is what we call straight cover brush stroke. All right. And then I have this butterfly here and I'm going to use yellow for the body, the wing of the brush. And then I use the vermilion from the tip. And then I use the medium, soft medium and pull it together. So you can only do this technique with the paper has sizing. So in our collection, we have shimmering shun or cicada and then the glass paper. So this is the body of the, so I think that I can do this one finished up with the whole composition. So the, the, the, the, the pulling brush can be too wet either. So you want to make sure is this damp. So this is pretty much a finished piece that we did in different stages. So I think it's important to note that when you do this from beginning to end, you will often work on multiple compositions at once and each layer of the color need to wait until dry. Yes. So then if you can work on more than one, it sort of eliminates, it allows you to use some of the dead time while you wait for other versions of it to dry. And I think it also gets you into a rhythm. And the other thing about the importance of the rhythm is some many times we will encourage people to get multiple color application brushes because they're not expensive brushes. And if you don't have the break to wash the brush in between, you can develop a little bit more of a pleasing rhythm as you do a lot of color shading concurrently. So that's kind of sometimes why you will see us recommend three or even six of these softer brushes. So you can have one for lighter color and one for darker color without having to break and rinse the brush in the middle. And we have very limited copy of this fan-shaped Muzong Lin's book. So if you're interested, make sure you place your order right away because otherwise it will be sold out.