Painting

The rainy season has arrived in the bay area, making indoor activities much more attractive than before. Carol and I planned to hang out in the afternoon in her place, doing some painting and crafting. We did this several times at Princeton when trying to escape from pressure in the real world. Playing arts while gossiping seemed very effective in relieving stress. Although most people prefer painting with pigments, but I always feel more comfortable with lines. Once I copied a sketch from Uffizi Gallery, showing a girl serenely looking down with a little smile, lost in her own thoughts. We spent about two hours painting and chatting on that Friday night. Carol made a painting of the Twin Peaks with oil pastels, Leslie made a painting of a waterfall and a tourist with charcoals, and I did this one with a pencil. Sketching is easy and flexible: it's easy because I can present all my imagination with just a pencil; and it's flexible because I don't need to worry if I accidentally make mistakes during the painting, a few more lines can fix the problem. Therefore it's always my first choice when painting. As many other painters, I start with portrait, and feel more comfortable with faces than bodies. (I know nothing about anatomy.)

Drawing cartoons can be even easier - no worry about light and shade, and all I need is to delineate the outline and then fill up details. When I'm facing a tight time budget, like one hourish, cartoon is always the best choice. The portrait of Shaka, a character in Saint Seiya on the left took me less than 30 minutes. I was chatting with Gang when drawing. Sometimes I believe that drawing is a processed in a separate part in our brains from thinking as I can think over during the conversation while drawing something totally irrelevant.


Later I bought some crayons at Walmart at around $4, and tried to color some of my paintings. I did a portrait of Okitasougo, a character in Gintama. He has light brown hairs and black eyes, and always wears a dark purple uniform. This picture is about him getting angry, which turns his eyes into scarlet. Crayons help to create a more colorful world, but lack the freshness and softness in oil painting or gouache, which make the color look less authentic. If not applied well, crayons can cover the original lines and make the final product even worse than the sketch. But I slowly get a sense of coloring through these crayons.

After I have a better idea of colors, I try to use them more. This time when I did painting with Carol, I tested oil pastels in traditional Chinese painting. In general oil pastels have brighter and stronger colors than crayons: actually they are so strong that sometimes it's hard to tell whether a painting is performed with oil pastels or brushes. I enjoyed the experiment very much, and for the first time in my life I realized that traditional Chinese paintings can be copied without brushes. Later I looked at more similar paintings, and found that traditional Chinese paintings rarely have strong colors, but prefer to create room for imagination through light colors and clear lines. It came to my mind that I should use crayons instead of oil pastels. That was why I decided to paint "Mountain Streams and Pines" (松涛山涧) as below. Crayons are unable to show details (they're just too thick), but can do a good job in light coloring, which is exactly what many Chinese landscape paintings are about - or in their words, the art of space.