Inktober 2018 Week 1

Inktober 2018 bamboo

 

Hi all, wow are you?

It’s that time of year again, inktober. As I said last week I wasn’t really going to participate this year due to a case of the bleah’s. Then I hit on the idea of doing something completely new to me, Chinese brush painting, I’m so glad I did.

Here are the covers of the books I’m using.

know very little about this subject so I’m using three library books for reference.
Chinese brush by Jane Evans.
Not a bad book for a beginner – gives stroke direction and basic strokes needed for the first exercises, lots of lovely colour illustrations, some advanced stuff at the back.

Chinese brush painting traditional & contemporary using ink and water-soluble media by Cheng Yan.
A beautiful book with loads of lovely colour illustrations but not a book for beginners.

Sumi~e by Hakuho Hirayama
This book has no bells and whistles, no shiny coloured illustrations, just good basic information on brush strokes and why or where to use them, A very good beginner’s book.

There are four basic seasonal objects from nature to paint called the four honourable gentlemen.
Bamboo (summer)
Chrysanthemum (autumn)
Plum blossom (winter)
Chinese orchid (spring)
For some reason all of the books do these lessons in different orders!? These exercises teach everything you need to know to learn all of the strokes needed for Chinese brush painting.

Top painting is a bonus bamboo – an extra bamboo that was painted but not posted, I quite like it so I put it here.
Days 1-3 Bamboo – a few different arrangements to start off with

Day 01 inktober 2018 bamboo

Day 02 inktober 2018 bamboo

Day 03 inktober 2018 bamboo

Days 4-6 Chinese orchids – again some different arrangements

Day 04 inktober 2018 orchid. Light flowers and dark flowers

Day 05 inktober 2018 orchid

Day 06 inktober 2018 orchid

Day 07 Chrysanthemum – so many petals. To be honest though it’s just different lengths of the same stroke so when you’ve learned the stroke it’s not too difficult.

Day 07 inktober chrysanthemum

Traditional paper for Chinese painting is usually rice paper, I don’t have any and reading the books they say any absorbent paper like news print is fine. I’m using a mixture of news print copy paper and some kids drawing paper that I’ve had knocking about for years, they are all very absorbent and I have found the kids drawing paper works very well for the bamboo.

I’m working in black ink at the moment, then once I have learned the brush strokes I’ll think about adding some colour. Chinese brush painting is usually done with watercolour but since it’s inktober I will try to keep it to coloured ink for now and see if I can make it work

It’s fun to take part in this challenge and also a lot of fun checking out other people’s inky efforts. There is a lot of amazing artwork going on around the internets.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by today. Till next time, have fun x