Sumi-e & Ink Painting – Page 11

Water Birds

Water birds – wading, fishing birds – are a common theme in many Asian paintings. These include cranes, herons, egrets. There is something incredibly beautiful and fierce about these birds.

Seeing these birds is an incredible experience. When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, my dormitory looked out over the lagoon. Great Blue Herons nested in the eucalyptus trees. One day, an escaped pink flamingo began living in the water! Hiking in the Matilija Creek area of Ventura County, I sat down and suddenly, within inches of my head, whoosh! – out flies a heron! Egrets wade in the marshy areas of local rivers.

Imagine yourself as one of these birds. Suddenly, your legs bend forward at the knee, not backward. You don’t have hands. You have long, wide wings, with feathers rippling out from the sides of your body as you bring them forward. Your nose is now long, longer, longer . . . how long is a bill? Is it a bill or a beak? And your nose is also your mouth – snap! A fish, a frog for dinner. And then, there is your neck. Long and undulating, suddenly your head is able to turn to look behind you, it goes up and down a long distance (certainly longer than mine!). And eyes on either side of your head, not looking out in front of you. How does it affect your vision? Lack of depth but awareness of movement?

Take a walk in your new bird body . . . feel how your shoulders hunch, how your wings expand, how you walk in the water . . . expand the crest on your head, fluff your feathers . . . launch yourself into the sky like a rocket, stand still and then, faster than can be seen, snatch your fish from the creek. How do your claws feel as they dangle when you walk, when you come in to land, when you launch from your nest in the reeds? What do you see around you? Leafy trees, swamp grasses, other birds. What do you hear? Rain on water? Wind in the trees? What do you feel when the wind rustles your feathers or rain pours off your back?

Photos are incredible resources for studying birds. There are many public domain sites from which photos can be copied. The snowy egret above came from the digital library system of the US Fish & Game site: http://images.fws.gov/. Take a look . . . imagine . . . think about how your brush can create a feather, catch a movement. What shades of grey? White? Ink only?

Line & Color, vii

The Final Pictures

The final decision was to attempt to darken the middle flower and create more light / dark contrast. Don’t think it works. The other choice was to move from more warm at the base of the painting to cooler on top. Washes of yellows and yellowy-pinks went in, from bottom to top. Purple-blues were overlaid the very top flower.

To a degree, I think this warm-to-cool saves the painting, but the lost contrast in the middle flower weakens it as a whole. The contrasts between the red and green of the leaves helps, but doesn’t save it. The B&W below shows this quite clearly.

Line & Color, vi

PINKS – Too Much?

Second layering of pinks added, cool and warm, and more of the original underlying light pink. The photo below shows where the painting is currently – and I am not happy at all! The big middle flower disappears into the background of leaves – it has lost its sparkle. The reason is pretty simple: the flower now is the same value as the leaves. Rats!

I was looking at this picture last night, and it took me awhile to realize what had happened. Here is another way to test the values (shades of grey) in a picture – take a digital photograph in black and white, or turn your color image into a B&W image in a software program. Problem is immediately apparent, as you can see below.

Before Second Layer of Pink

After Second Layer of Pink

The lesson here is twofold. First, layering more of one color, or other colors, can create this problem. Second is to think ahead from now on. Experiment with colors, take a picture, look. Better yet, analyze the picture and then see if my camera bears out my theory!

In painting, value is the hardest for me to “get.” B&W photos help me see this better. Last night, I put the picture on the door to look at it. It seemed dull and uninteresting. I looked, and looked, and then looking at my earlier photos, I realized what had happened.

The next question is – to darken up the central flower, or to lighten it with white? Darken the leaves? Hmmmm.

Line & Color, v

PINK

With the basic foundations of warm and cold greens laid down, time to paint the flowers. Pink seems to be more summery to me, so pink it will be! I will be using a total of three pinks. The foundation pink is neither too blue nor too red, and so will be the underpainting for the warm and cold pink to be applied later. This picture shows several layers of the same pink – the darker the pink, the more layers of color. The palest areas are single color layers. The medium pinks are two to three layers of color. The darkest have up to six.

The detailed picture will give you a better idea of some of the subtle differences of one, two, or more layers. The smaller flowers have only one to two color layers – see the slight changes in color density?

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COLD GREEN

Once the warm green dried – and more than one layer of it in some areas – it was time to add the cool green. This green is a viridian or phthalo green, so there is a bluish tint to it. The next picture shows the pale layers before they begin to build up. Warm and cool greens begin to meet.

Subsequent layers – two or three more -begin to show the intensity of the colors, as well as areas where warm and cool work together to show the underside of a leaf, such as on the far right side. Mottling is done to see how warm and cool will work together underneath yet another layer of green. Below you will see a leaf with a lighter, warmer green center surrounded by cooler green.