Chinese Bamboo Painting

Chinese painting is of cultural implication, and Chinese bamboo painting is famous. Today, Artisoo gallery will teach you how to draw a Chinese bamboo painting in the flowing steps.

Find suitable bamboo to paint. If you have bamboo growing in the garden, set your easel in front of this. Alternatively, visit the Botanical Gardens or a Chinese Garden in your area. If you cannot find live bamboo, look online for a suitable photo. If you don't have the time to sit before live bamboo, take a photo to help you remember the colors and proportions.

Select the appropriate colors. Bamboo is mostly green, but as in the painting shown above, this coloring can be varied with shades of fawn, beige, etc.

Draw the stem first. Draw this straight. You can add the knobbly elements as you go. Draw a bunch of stems if you are making a bamboo grove; or simply concentrate on drawing a single bamboo length.

Add the leaves. Position these at even intervals along the stem.

Paint the colors. The design above provides a good example of adding shading as you paint, to portray the roundness and smoothness of bamboo.

Nymph of the Luo River

"Nymph of the Luo River" by Gu Kaizhi of Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420) illustrates a romantic poem by Cao Zhi from the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period. The copy collected by the Palace Museum in Beijing is a facsimile of the original made during the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

The narrative silk scroll depicts the meeting and the eventual separation of Cao Zhi and the Nymph of the Luo River; the art captures the tension through the composition of the figures, stones, trees and mountains. The painting is one of the most important Chinese artworks, representing the beginning of the development of Chinese landscape paintings.

Five Oxen

"Five Oxen" is a painting by Han Huang, a prime minister in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The painting was lost during the occupation of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 and later recovered from a collector in Hong Kong during the early 1950s. Now it is stored in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The painting is 139.8 cm long and 20.8 cm wide. The five oxen in varied postures and colors in the painting are drawn with thick, heavy and earthy brushstrokes. They are endowed with subtle human characteristics, delivering the spirit of the willingness to bear the burden of hard labor without complaints.

Most of the paintings recovered from ancient China are of flowers, birds and human figures. This painting is the only one with oxen as its subject that are represented so vividly, making the painting one of the best animal paintings in Chinese art history.

2. Soak it in a cup of water.

3. Take the brush out when it is soft.

4. Hold the brush in your right or left hand. Holding the brush higher creates weaker, softer strokes while holding closer to the bristles create solid, more defined strokes.

5. Use your ring finger, middle finger and thumb to hold the brush.

6. Keep your elbow above the table.

7. Dip the ink stick in water and grind against the ink stone until the ink has an oily consistency.

8. Bottled ink: Pour ink into the ink stone.

9. Begin writing characters, tilting the brush using the fingers, not the hands. Tilting the brush can add certain effects to the character that may or may not be desirable.

10. Finished Chinese calligraphy painting

Plum Blossom

This Chinese painting that took the artist over a month to complete is a masterpiece synthesizing verse, calligraphy, painting and seals into an organic whole. The composition is dense, with ink or color washes touching all borders, but leaves some free spaces, for instance in the above and right parts. The composition is also dynamic with the plum dancing in the wind, but anchored by the two neat and serene inscriptions.