A Pair of Bunnies

Day 6 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November. The challenge is hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. Marie's Chinese watercolor with Chinese ink on soft shikishi, which is made of a thin mulberry paper on a thin but stiff cardboard. Evidently the mulberry paper doesn't like water ... as I was quickly to learn!

I'm using soft shikishi during this challenge for the first time, and this particular painting was a huge learning curve in new material. I assumed that soft shikishi was similar with board shikishi and so, wanting to make large swaths of ink with my brush, I liberally loaded the brush with ink. However, I quickly found out this paper has low tolerance for moisture and bleeds so easily. I painted the bunnies and they bloomed and bled. I repainted the edge along their bodies a couple of times to lessen the blooming and blossoming. Needless to say, I was not happy. That said, the blurring of lines did more or less go with the subject matter and did create softer bodies on the bunnies ... and weird blobs too. Still, I will note this problem, which several other OASlife members also made comment to the difficulties of liquid they've had with this material. The big reason in joining the OASlife painting challenge was to learn new techniques and materials ... and so today was a huge success!

Day 6 of the Asian-style painting challenge: A Pair of Bunnies
Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese ink on soft shikishi