Last week, right after I published my blog, I received the Japanese Ink Painting Kit I had ordered (see last week’s blog for more background on this). I posted a few short videos on my Facebook page if you want to see it. It came with some unexpected extras, including two large sheets of “magic” practice paper which you use with plain water to practice brushstrokes. This is very good because you could use up a lot of paper getting those brushstrokes just right! I chose the largest brush in the set to begin practicing because Naomi Okamoto in her book “Japanese Ink Painting: The Art of Sumi-e” says that this is the hardest to control and you should start with the hardest. My kind of teacher! I practiced some of the easier strokes, like painting bamboo, which I had seen done in several YouTube videos. Of course it didn’t take long for me to get tired of using just water, and I wanted to start grinding some ink! So I got that out and started grinding away! You basically put a few drops of water on your ink stone then start rubbing the ink stick on it to dissolve some of the compressed dry ink. Here is a video of the process: https://youtu.be/0fweYYmWK2g It is slow going!! Very slow. I knew this from the videos I had watched, but I didn’t know what quality of ink stick I would be getting so I didn’t know how difficult it would be. After about 5 minutes I just had to stop and try the ink! (Next time I know I will have to take more time, not only to get more ink, but also to get it darker) I had already practiced the classic “bamboo” so this was my natural choice for what to try after I had practiced just seeing how the brush reacted. I have included a photo of the result, which I am actually quite happy with for a first “painting”. The ink was not dark enough, but that is what practice is for! What I like the most about it, compared to my usual work in watercolor, is how the places where there is no ink in the bamboo sections are as important as the places where there is ink. They give dimension to the stalk, even though the blank spaces are on different sides in each section; in traditional realistic western painting, the lights and darks would all have to be on the same side, showing where light is coming from and where the shadows are, thus creating the illusion of form. In this case, the illusion is there without following that rule…. Very eye-opening! So you can tell I am having fun with this! Now I am following the lessons in the book, and promise to go more slowly to enjoy it even more! The first lesson is to paint a fish. I practiced many many times on the ‘magic’ paper, but was never really happy with the results. I decided to try on rice paper with ink and what a difference!! The water-only can’t produce the variation in tone that the ink does. It is either black or not. That is why I couldn’t get the results I wanted! Another eye-opener! But as you see in the attached photo, I did succeed to get a few reasonable looking fish from my efforts! It is on a different paper, which has grids for practicing calligraphy (that horrible spot in the top left was on the paper... I have no idea what it is!!) Now on to the next lesson: orchids!
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AuthorMy name is Claire Bureau. Archives
March 2023
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