Painting techniques for rice paper mounted card

Hi everyone, I'm Kate. Welcome back to my channel. Today I've bought a few more mounted cards from different suppliers and going to give it a try. I'm really happy that some of you have tried to buy it and then give it a try. Let's get started. So these are the cards that I've been using. These two are the ones I've demonstrated and this one is new. So they look very similar but they are from different suppliers and the quality has to be different too. The left one is the ones that I've been using and then the matting is fake. The new one looks more real. The inner white part is a separate piece of paper mounted on the art card and then the exterior is a different piece of paper mounted on the card. You can tell when you take a close-up look at the patterns of the paper. See the lines on the white is different from the color outside. Anyway, let's give it a try and test it out. I'm going to start with the eyes and take very little ink to paint. The good news is that it doesn't bleed so that you can have a better control of the strokes. Now I'm painting purple and I found that the paper may be a bit dried or ripe but I can only tell when I use a broader stroke with more water in it. Now I'm painting the ears and I'm gonna use a lot more water to see how it goes. See when a paper is ripe then the color won't penetrate into the paper so you won't see the deep shades of color as you paint. So I'm gonna apply a new technique for this painting for this cat. It is a Siamese kitten with darker color patterns on the ears, nose or face, tail and legs. The body is beige color but I need a contrast to show the shades of the body so I'm gonna use a light brown color. The way I mix this color is to use orange and ink but I dilute it with a lot of water to get this shade. As I paint I have a better feel of how much water this Monte Carte absorbs so I'm not carrying a lot of water in my brush belly when I paint. And now I'm painting the second four legs. Buying Chinese material is a bit tricky particularly the paper which is very crucial in Chinese painting. They're meant to be all handmade still and all suppliers tend to make them differently and even though this is also called half-ripe and it is certainly more ripe than the ones that I've used before, I'm going to show you the comparison later in this video. What I'm doing right now is that I've simply taken some water to paint and try to get some color out of the first layer to create the shades and it looks like it worked which is just like the western watercolor. Now I'm taking a large brush to paint the tail and it looks like it's going to take a long time to dry so I'm going to go ahead and paint some objects which is the yellow daisies. Well this white paper or card is more suited for the shortest strokes and it's not a problem like the way that I paint I just freely get some shades of yellow and orange and paint the petals and it seems like it's okay it doesn't bleed very easily so for beginners it is easier to control in a way. For freestyle or freehand Chinese painting we prefer very simple strokes and do not tend to correct or put too many layers on the same stroke or subjects so the gradient and variations in the strokes are very very important. So for red paper like this I think that it is more suited for the Gongbi or the dedicated type of Chinese painting which most of our artists will use shorter strokes and tend to dye and create more detail with like fine lines and multiple strokes on the same subject. And now I've taken too much water for this dance and I can see that the water is floating on the paper so what I have to do is to use a piece of tissue paper to dab it dry. That's why you see that the color all of a sudden looks lighter. Now I'm adding some bright color onto the nose area the way that I do it is to paint the color and then soften it up by adding some water onto the edges. The other way to do it is to add some water onto where you want to have soft edges first and then add some color later. Now let's take a look at what I've painted before and this is the bird that I've painted on the card that I bought the first time. The color is actually a lot deeper in terms of shading. You can see that the color actually seeps through it and versus this one the color looks like it's floating on top of the paper. Even though this is not as good as the first one that I bought I managed to create some nice soft shades of the cat which looks okay. Sometimes we just have to work with whatever we have and make it work. Anyway so thank you for watching. I'll see you next time!