How to Use This Book
T his book is for kids at least seven years old, teens, and adults—-anyone who wants to learn about the traditional Chinese way to write words and make paintings. You can read about and make the paintings on your own, or you can read the book with a parent or teacher, a brother, sister, or friend, and talk about what to do and why. Someone who knows about painting can be a big help.
This book shows you how to hold the brush Chinese-style and make the basic brushstrokes. You will learn to write some words and numbers in Chinese. Then you will learn how to use the same basic brushstrokes to create pictures of classic Chinese subjects, including orchids, bamboo, pine trees, and landscapes. This book explains how Chinese artists think about these subjects and what principles and traditions they follow in painting them. After you copy some examples and understand the principles, you can make your own designs. When you have completed some paintings, you can choose from several suggested ways to mount them for display.
You may wonder why the paintings in this book are not in color. The reason is that traditional Chinese paintings used only black ink. Different mixes of gray were treated like colors. Later, the Chinese added a few colors. After European styles became known in China, brush painting became more and more colorful and started copying Western watercolor styles. The older and simpler way of painting started to be ignored. This book tries to keep the older tradition alive. Its beauty comes from lines and shapes, shades of gray, and contrast between black, gray, and white. Chinese brush paintings are interesting just as black-and-white photography is interesting in its own way, without using color.
To do brush painting, you must learn to control the brush with your eyes, your arm, and your mind. When all three work together, you will be surprised at how great your Chinese-style paintings can look. You will learn new tricks with the brush that you didn’t know before. Brush painting takes a lot of practice, but it can also be a lot of fun and make you feel happy because of what you have learned and accomplished.
The Roots
of Chinese
Painting
C enturies ago in China, the first writers, whoever they were, made lines in the sand with their fingers. Then they added another line and another, until the designs reminded them of objects they had seen. The wind blew, and the images disappeared. Later, they found sticks and made marks in the hard dirt. Again, the lines suggested objects.
Meaningful Scratches
Such drawings were the beginning of written language in China. They are called pictographs . Five marks put together in a certain order looked like the sun, so the group of lines was read as “sun.” Other lines put together looked like mountain peaks and were read as “mountain.”
Researchers have discovered pictographs scratched onto turtle shells and the flat shoulder bones of animals. These are sometimes called “oracle bones” because they were used for telling the future. The practice dates back to around 1500 B.C., during the Shang dynasty. About 5,000 different pictographs have been discovered. They represent animals, plants, natural elements, manmade objects, and human beings.
Later, people wrote pictographs in ink with brushes on silk or paper. Over time, the pictographs changed from images of objects to symbolic figures called characters . New characters are always being added, so that today the Chinese language has over 50,000 characters. Many of these are not used very often. In China today, people learn how to speak and write about 2,800 characters for everyday use. A highly educated person learns at least 4,000 to 5,000 characters. So kids in China need to spend a lot of time learning to read and write characters.
Calligraphy
Writing a character with a brush is called calligraphy . This word means “beautiful writing.” Calligraphy has been very important throughout
Shae Mills
Barry Lyga
N.M. Silber
Mina Carter
Dudley Pope
Leslie Rule
Matthew Jones
Helen Grey
Josh McDowell
Stephen A Hunt