Tapsa at Maisan in Chinese Ink

Two weeks ago I joined a Korean landscape painting group, Wolyeonhoe, with perhaps 30 members. I'm not sure really how many are in the group yet, but they have group and individual exhibitions, and a group exhibition is coming up. The group paints every Monday night at the Lyceum, our Korea University Institute for Continuing Education, and everyone basically works on whatever they like -- from photos or webshots. It's a painting-slash-fellowship time of like-minded people to relax socially and artistically at the end of their professional day at work. I LOVE the atmosphere!

So the first night I just dabbled with ink and demonstrated what I knew, and the leader came by and showed me different strokes. Ah! Yes! Techniques on how to manage the ink on such thin hanji (Korean rice paper)! Ink management has been my bane!

Last Monday was a holiday but tonight I came prepared with a picture to paint, a calligraphy landscape by Hong Sung-Mo from his 4th solo exhibition in 2004. I love his light style and delicate brushwork, not the typical heavy brushwork of a lot of Asian painting, but definitely the brushstrokes of someone familiar with western-style watercolor painting. Many of the painting group came over and checked out his exhibition book, which a friend gave me, and really commented what an elegant painter he is! I so totally agree! He doesn't seem to be online, but here's my version of his Tapsa, the temple near Maisan (Horse-ear Mountain) at Jinan, Jeollabuk-do.

Disclaimer, in the early stages I was having trouble managing clean strokes, so the master teacher, a painter of 20 years and very looked up to by the group, came by and demonstrated the quick sketch of Tapsa temple in the upper-right. I wish he did the strokes on another paper, but it's the culture here for the master to paint on the student's paper. It's all a part of the learning process. But wow, after just watching how he quickly dipped the brush in ink rhythmically and swipe it twice before end-brushing the paper really was an epiphany how to control not only the ink but place brush strokes more smoothly!

My first landscape painting! Looking forward to next week 😊 😊 😊 !!!

Playful Otters

Day 18 of the Asian-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. Something's lacking in this quick otter study ... I think it's value. Anyway, Chinese ink with Marie's Chinese watercolors on soft shikishi board, the painting medium that bleeds like crazy. I'm learning what to expect with this stuff, just need more practice. Thus, participating in this month-long painting challenge. It's fun too to practice every day ... although I'm falling behind on the schedule a bit.

Day 18 of the Asian painting challenge: Playful Otters on soft shikishi
Reference pict on Pinterest

Hummer in the Honeysuckle

Day 16 of the Asian-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese ink on shikishi board. 

Day 16: Hummer in the Honeysuckle
(photo reference)

Mama Panda and Baby

Day 14 of the Asian-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese ink on soft shikishi (which bleeds terribly so is ideal for soft, fuzzy animals). 

Day 14: Mama Panda and Baby

Reference photo 

An Eagle Soars

Day 13 of the Asian-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. 

Day 13: Wings of the Eagle
Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese ink on shikishi board
reference painting by the amazing watercolorist Karl Martens

Reflecting on a Wood Duck

Day 12 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November, a challenge hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. 

Day 12: Reflecting on a Wood Duck
Marie's Chinese watercolors and ink on shikishi board

Lilies and Ladybugs

Day 11 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November, a challenge hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. 

Day 11: Lilies and Ladybugs
Marie's Chinese watercolors on shikishi board

Cranes at Dawn

Day 10 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. This is my favorite so far in this year's challenge.

Day 10 of the painting challenge: Cranes at Dawn
Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese Ink on soft shikishi
Reference for a Chinese Painting Crane Gallery

Apes with Afros

Day 9 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. I struggled with this one as the soft shikishi can't take much moisture, so with the diluted ink in my brush the ink just blossomed, and that's one thing that Chinese ink does oh so very well! Still, I'm quite satisfied with how I captured the faces; they are the one saving grace for this blobby painting.

Day 9 of the painting challenge: Apes with Afros
Marie's Chinese watercolors and ink on soft shikishi
Reference: Cyril Blondeau's "Monkey with Baby"

Day 9 of the painting challenge: Apes with Afros
Marie's Chinese watercolors and ink on soft shikishi
Reference: Cyril Blondeau's "Monkey with Baby"

Family of Squirrels

Day 8 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November, the challenge annually hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook every June and November. Today's contribution is less like a traditional Asian-style brush painting than a western-style watercolor, but my intentions were to paint this pict with Asian-style simple brush-strokes in ink. That said, after I got the simplest pencil sketch for layout purposes on the paper, I realized that the details were too fine for the Chinese brushes to get sufficient detail, especially since the paper is soft shikishi known for bleeding anyway. So much for using only Chinese ink. Therefore, opted to use Marie's Chinese watercolors with only accents of Chinese ink. My mom loves this picture ... so that makes my heart feel good!

Day 8 of the Asian-style painting challenge: Family of Squirrels
Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese ink on soft shikishi
Reference: Pinterest picture

Prideful Peacock on Shikishi Board

Day 7 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November, a challenge hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. This isn't really a traditional Asian-style painting but am using Asian materials -- Chinese watercolors and Chinese ink on Japanese hard shikishi board. I didn't quite plan for it to turn out so "fairytale-like" as one of the comments on Facebook said, but the colors weren't blending. Shikishi board doesn't allow blending (excellent! I learned something else during this challenge) and so to make it look cohesive and less circus-stripe style, I added the Chinese ink. Even though the painting didn't turn out like I expected, I kind of like the end product. Very fanciful anyway.

Day 7 of the Asian-style painting challenge: Prideful Peacock on Shikishi Board
Marie's Chinese watercolors with Chinese ink

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

Two Torpid Turtles

Day 4 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November. The challenge is hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook. Wow, spent a bit of time on this contribution because the last few nights its been the 5-10 minute quickie submission. Erg, but I hate this one and if I had time, I would repaint. Ah well, we can't love everything we paint, but the artist would like the public to think that they are always successful with their creations. Not true. Anyway, my contribution for the day:

Day 4 of the Asian painting challenge: Two Torpid Turtles
Marie's Chinese watercolors and Chinese Ink on soft shikishi
(I kind of referenced Hokusai's turtles for this painting)

Thinkin' o' Somethin' t' Crow About

Day 3 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 hanji. 

Day 3 of the painting challenge: Thinkin' o' Somethin' t' Crow About

An Inky Feline

Day 2 of the Chinese-style painting challenge for November. The challenge is hosted by OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook, and while the group is hosted by the online Oriental Art Supply market, it certainly is NOT about marketing its product but just holding a forum for like-minded people to paint and interact among themselves at. There's a lot of support among the 563 members, and people dialog on their practice of birds, butterflies or lines, or sometimes the shows or classes they are participating in, or they ask questions on materials. I've joined a lot of painting sites (mostly watercolor) on Facebook over the past year, but this OASlife is one of my favorites. The people are consistent, supportive, not competitive or only marginally, and they offer a great artistic display of talent!

My contribution for Day 2 of the challenge, like yesterday, painted in only 5 minutes, but at least I like this contribution (hanji and Chinese ink): 

Day 2 of the painting challenge: An Inky Feline
Original source

"Angry-bird" in Chinese Ink

OASlife (Oriental Art Supply) on Facebook holds their annual Asian-style painting challenge for the month of November. Last year I participated even though my first love is watercolor painting, but I learned so-ooo much on a related artform that I decided to join again this year. 

To be more precise what I learned last year: 

• the importance of just a few strokes to create an image (wasn't very good at this)
• the importance of a single line
• the huge importance of value -- a very transferrable skill for watercolor painting!!!
• learning to use the Chinese watercolors which have more binder than western watercolors (really not much difference. The big difference between the painting mediums is the material which is painted on, not the paint itself!)
• and of course an introduction to different kinds of papers (the Chinese double and single shuen, raw shuen, semi-sized shuen .... I still don't know how to differentiate these), the Korean hanji paper and the Japanese rice paper, and the two kinds of Japanese shikishi called doobangji in Korea -- the two kinds being a soft shikishi made with mulberry paper mounted on a thin cardboard and the other of a more durable paper mounted on a heavier board and which can take a lot of water abuse!). So true: The paper or the medium that gets painted on is the big controlling factor for the final outcome! This I am continually learning!

So I'm back to learn more this year, but unfortunately this year I'm ultra busy. Tonight I was so tired and just before dropping into bed I remembered that today started the new painting challenge. So five minutes later I submitted and then dropped into bed. I really need to put some more thought into this challenge, or I won't feel good about myself at the end of the month. My shabby five-minute contribution:

Day 1 of the OASlife painting challenge: Evidently day of the angry-bird
Marie's Chinese watercolors on Korean hanji w/ touches of Chinese ink

OASlife members are very supportive, and even feeble efforts are supported, with a few people going out of their way to comment on every contribution ... amazing group support!  So, two back-to-back comments on this bird was: "LOVE the expression on that bird" and "That bird is just too much!" Well, I never saw an emotionally-expressive angry bird before either! 

Sonja and Dog, Minhwa Painting

Sonja, tea master and minhwa painter (traditional Korean folk), wanted a picture of herself serving tea, her dog that is burned in incredible memory in her brain, and both sitting together under a wild plum tree with a traditional pavilion in the background.

"Serving Tea" - Sonja and Dog
Minhwa-style watercolor
Arches 11" x 14"

Sonja's Dog: Korean Folk Painting

Since I still haven't delivered Sonja's Minhwa (Korean traditional folk painting) dog painting to her, and because she said she wished she could paint her dog "smoking a pipe" and in other traditional Korean folk story motifs, I was intrigued to try a Korean folk-tale kind of painting. So I mixed up a bunch of Korean folk ideas and put them together for my friend who absolutely loves the traditional in Korea.

Folk ideas blended in this painting:

• the rabbit in the moon -- the Korean folk view of the moon unlike the western concept of the 'man in the moon'
• the beginning of a traditional Korean fairy tale is "A long time ago when tigers smoked pipes ..." and usually a pair of rabbits is serving the tiger -- animals are common features of Korean fairy tales, but the reason for coupling rabbits and a tiger in a fairy tale I don't know
• tigers are often paired with magpies in folk paintings, I'm not sure why again, but do know that magpies by themselves are harbingers of good luck -- so magpies or rather crows get featured with the tiger substitute, the dog, and like the tiger that is painted comically with magpies or pairs of rabbits and wearing a hat, the dog is also comically painted with a hat
• pine trees are symbols of the scholar and "uprightness" (correctness and Confucianism because of their typically straight appearance

Korean Folk Story Motifs

Dog Minhwa Painting

A friend who is a minwha painter (traditional Korean folk painter) and who does tea ceremonies here in Korea commissioned me to immortalize her precious dog that passed several years ago but is still treasured in her and her parents' memories. What she wanted was a minhwa-style painting with her Chow-mix dog, a tea table, plum blossoms, and a bug (preferably two as paired animals, birds, bugs express harmony)...... so her ideas transposed to art form on 26cm x 36cm / 10" x 14" Arches pad hot press watercolor paper with Daniel Smith watercolors:

This is mixed media, not just watercolor, as I used Micro pens (0.005, 0.02, and 0.5) for some lines, and a white jel pen for white highlights.

Derwent Artbar Color Swatches + Sample Painting

Am pretty good about stemming impulse buys, but I bumped into a few questions on whether the Derwent Artbar were still being sold so tried to find out if they were being discontinued. Who can wade through the rumors on the web, so because I had been looking at the Artbars, and because Amazon had one left and at the cheapest price I'd ever seen, I did the impulse thing and bought the full 72-color-bar set. 

Here's the result of my impulse buy -- a full color chart of the Artbars. My method was to liberally apply 3 cm of color on dry 200gm watercolor paper and then add water with a paintbrush and drag the color down about 6-7 inches.  I might add I didn't apply strong pressure when liberally applying the color as the bars easily break along the score lines. The outcome is that the paint looked light but dried even lighter. Before purchasing, I did know the Artbars were a bit light in color but I was a bit surprised at just how pastel they are, especially the 12 colors in the "light" category.

That said, there are many ways to apply color. To make the chart above I used the dry then wet approach, but I found that wetting a paint brush and swiping up paint from the edge of an Artbar was a more effective way of painting; more effective on not leaving a trace of non-hydrated Artbar from coloring dry with pressure and more effective because the color intensity could be more easily managed. Like in the dry bar on dry paper method, for this wet brush on Artbar technique I didn't need a palette to mix the colors, but who would with a selection of 72 colors to choose from?! 

So here's a sample painting using the wet brush and swipe on Artbar method to get color for painting: 

Chinese-style tiger painting

Derwent Artbars and Pigma Micron pens - Original

My opinion about the Artbars? Well, they are pastel and because they are so light, I do wonder about how lightfast they are, and so am unlikely to use them for a painting to be hung on the wall. However, they are quite fun to use and I can see taking these "fun" colors out (and 72 of them!) when friends or kids come over and having an art party! A party without having color mixing trays so easy to organize and easy to clean up after too! They'll be awesome for making greeting cards or putting some quick and easy drawing-painting like the above in a letter. So this impulse buy isn't one that I regret.