Bored Taiwanese Mailboxes

Not sure how often people use mail boxes these days, but those two looked awfully bored when I took their photo at Xi Men Ting on 7/22/2006.

Once again, I did this in my Moleskine Pocket Plain Book, a lousy choice for watercolor. And once again, I didn’t plan to do watercolor when I was drawing those two mailboxes; I just wanted to get rid of the unpleasant feeling left from my chocolate cake drawing. (Have I mentioned that I didn’t even like cakes?)

One of the problems with this paper plus waterbrushes is that it’s hard to get dark colors. (The other major problem is that it’s impossible to have even washes.) These two mailboxes are much too light for their real world counterparts, but because I’m so fond of them, this little technical issue didn’t bother me all that much. What can I say? I’m shamelessly biased.

Chocolate Cake

I don’t know why I drew this one; I don’t even like cakes. Because I don’t like it, it’s impossible to make it look delicious.

This is a book example from Yozo Nakamori’s “Yasashi Sketch“, one of my many Japanese painting books that I acquired during this trip. The Japanese watercolor style is quite different from the Western one. Besides their colors tend to be softer, lines usually play an important role. Also, the end results usually aren’t photo realistic like the Western ones.

Personally I like the Japanese watercolor style more, because it’s closer to sketching and more vivid. Most Western watercolor paintings strike me as stiff and unnecessarily realistic, which leave very little room to my imagination.

And, of course, ultimately I’d like to be able to do Chinese brush pen painting. It’s very Tao to me. There is no difference between sketching and painting. Each stroke itself has infinite possibilities: Let it be a fish, let it be a tree branch, or let it be a bird. As far as your imagination allows you! But unfortunately, it’s also the hardest, IMHO. Forgot who said this, “Practice, practice, practice.”

Chinese Postcard 2

My first lousy effort of Chinese colored brush painting on rice paper (well, it’s actually made of bamboo). It’s embarassing, but it serves as a starting point of my Chinese brush painting. My first watercolor painting was embarrassingly bad, too, and you know, there is a first for everything.

Oh, I can list over a dozen of mistakes about this one, but the fundamental problems coming from my unfamiliarity with Chinese brush painting. I thought it was similar to watercolor painting and applied the same techniques. However, that was the source of my grief.

Rice paper absorbs lots of water, so waterbrushes do not work well with it. It’s hard to see colors, because rice paper becomes translucent when wet. It’s also hard to fix mistakes due to its nature. The wet-in-wet technique on rice paper doesn’t quite work the same way as on watercolor paper (plus, I couldn’t see colors when it was that wet). Also, the brush I picked up to do the writing was of lousy quality. I know it sounds like an excuse, but I had better luck with my other brushes. I’m still unfamiliar with the difference between my brushes and have to do a lot of trial and error.

Chinese painting is HARD! Gotta work on it more…