As I mentioned yesterday, we’ve already started learning some new techniques in our Chinese classes. With this piece we’ve been encouraged to first draw on ordinary paper in pencil, and then ink it, to use as a guide under the rice paper. The reason being that with more complicated subjects you’d need to be very good to be able to paint it directly on the rice paper, and the paper is too delicate to draw on and then rub the pencil out.
So, we’ve started our Sultan Tit which is positioned in the top left of a square sheet and will eventually also be on a branch. It took a while to get to this stage because of all the preliminary steps but I’m pleased that the two months break isn’t showing yet – it helps that the new brush strokes we’re learning are mostly very dry for this picture, I’m certain I would have had more trouble if we’d been trying to control wet brush strokes! Next we have some colour to add…