Modern Chinese Painting Tutorial | Episode 2 : Great Horned Owl

Hi, I'm Kate. Welcome back to my channel. A few years ago, I visited an owl's forest in Japan. Well, it's not a real forest. It's a tourist attraction where you pay to get in to see some owls. It was surprisingly fun though. There are many species that you can even touch some of them. And today, I'm going to paint a great horned owl. It is the most common owl of the Americas. The bird is very powerful and it features bright yellow eyes and the feather tufts on its head. I'm going to start with the eyes. I suppose there are different ways to paint birds. This is the way I did it for the owls. But you can certainly find your own ways to start and create a completely different style. The great horned owls always look serious. The eyebrows are low and I'm painting a little bit of eyebrows for this owl. For the eyes, make sure that you don't have too much water in your brush belly when you paint. Otherwise, the eyes will look murky. The feather tufts are just feathers. They are not horns nor ears. For now, I'm just using ink to paint the feather and create an outline for the face. The reason why I'm using ink only for now is because remember in Chinese painting, the first layer cannot be easily covered by a second one. So if I were going to paint an outline, it will be better to use ink and then I'm going to add a lighter color on top of it. Then it will be shown. Now I'm adding brown color which is a mixture of orange color and ink. There is a brown Chinese pigment that you can use but I just don't have it. So I'm mixing my own shades of brown. When you're painting the second layer on top of the first one, timing is very important. It really depends on the effects that you want to achieve. Just like the western watercolor, when you are trying to paint wet on wet, then you're expecting a good blend of color that mix together. And when you're painting wet on dry, then the wet ink will just sit on top of the drying. But in Chinese painting, the rice paper is very different from the western cold pressed watercolor paper. The water absorption level is very different. It's actually very high. So you're not going to see any water running on the surface of the rice paper even though it is wet on wet. So when we want to blend color, we tend to paint the second layer when the first layer is semi-dried. Now I'm going to paint the forest. It will be some dry fruit trees and a large birch tree for the big bird to perch on. Now you can probably see that the owl is slightly behind the birch tree. For the berries, I'm going to use some yellow and orange color to paint. I like gradient and variation, so I will make some of the berries more reddish and some yellowish. Now I'm finishing the owl with the wings. For the eyes, I'm using yellow and orange color. For the claws, I'm using brown color. You can use ink as well. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.