Tools, Materials and Usage of Chinese Painting

1. Classification of pens:

There are three types of pens: stiff hair, soft hair and double brush.

(1) Hard pen: Hard pen is mainly made of wolf hair, and can also be made of hair or bristles of badgers, minks and rats, which is strong and powerful. Commonly used are Little Red Hair, Clothes Pattern Pen, Ye Jin Pen, Book Brush (large, medium and small), Zhu Lan (large, medium and small) and Wolf Brush.

(2) Soft pen: Soft pen is mainly made of wool or bird feathers. They are soft in nature and come in various sizes and lengths.

(3) Double-stranded brush: Double-stranded brush is made of wool and wolf hair, or wool and rabbit hair, which is neutral in nature. For example, large, medium and small "Baiyun Pen", "Seven Purple Three Sheep" and "Five Purple Five Sheep" are all commonly used double-strand brush pens.

2. How to use this pen

When learning painting, you don't have to have all the pens. At first, you only need a few large, medium and small pens. Asking questions from difficulties is of great benefit to the training of basic skills. When you are proficient in painting, you can prepare more pens and choose good pens when you create.

After each painting, you must clean the brush with clear water to prevent Su Mo and residual color from staying at the root of the pen and damaging its performance. Don't wash the pen with boiling water, because boiling water will make the pen hard and brittle. The general way to keep pens is to wash them and put them in a pen container or hang them up. When you go out to paint, you can buy a small curtain made of fine bamboo silk, called a pen curtain, and roll the pen in the pen curtain, which is very convenient to carry and can also protect the brush from being damaged;

② Ink

1. Classification of ink:

There are two kinds of ink: "oily smoke smell" and "pine smoke smell". Painting is done with oily smoke and ink.

(1) 【 cigar smoke ink 】 cigar smoke ink is made by burning tobacco seeds with tung oil. Oil fume ink has luster and is suitable for painting. (2) [Song Yanmo] Song Yanmo is an ink made of burning smoke from pine branches. Pine smoke is dark and suitable for writing, but it is not often used for painting. Song Yanmo is occasionally used to paint butterflies, or as a deep purple background. For example, painting the ink painting Purple Peony must take Song Yanmo as the prototype.

2. How to use ink

Clean water should be used for grinding ink. Press it again and push it gently, not too fast. The grinding circle is relatively large. Don't use too much water at a time. If you need more ink, you can pour the ground ink into another bowl and grind it several times.

After Mo Ding's research, the ink nozzle must be dried to prevent it from being broken. Mo Ding should not be exposed to sunlight or moisture. It is best to wrap the ink in paper and then coat it with a layer of wax to prevent the ink from breaking and getting dirty.

(3) paper

1. Chinese painting paper

（ 1）

In ancient painting in China, silk was mostly used for painting, and it was a good painting material. Silk can also be divided into raw silk and cooked silk. After finishing, it is called cooked silk, which is suitable for meticulous painting Now some meticulous paintings still use silk. However, the cost of silk is high and it is not convenient to popularize. There are fewer people painting with silk now. Cooked rice paper is similar to silk in nature, so now it is used instead of silk.

② Xuan paper:

After Yuan Dynasty, Xuan paper was gradually used in painting. China's rice paper began to be produced in the Tang Dynasty. Because the rice paper produced in Xuancheng, Anhui Province is the most famous, it is called rice paper.

Xuan paper has strong water absorption and is easy to penetrate, and it is easy to solidify with more water. This is its characteristic, and the painted ink colors are varied, giving full play to the unique expressive force and pen and ink techniques of Chinese painting.

Common Xuan paper includes: clean leather, semi-woven fabric, cotton joint, etc.

Good rice paper should have the following characteristics:

One is to fix it with a pen, that is, there are pen marks between strokes on the painting;

The second is inking, that is, the pen is not strung on the paper, there will be no collusion between shades, and the ink color will not be gray;

Third, the permeability is moderate …

When rice paper is processed with alum water, it is called alum paper or cooked rice paper, and its characteristics are changed to non-absorbent and non-exposed, which is convenient for meticulous painting to be colored layer by layer or dyed with watercolor. Commonly used cooked rice paper includes: "Cicada Wing Xuan" and "Alum Cotton Company".

The performance of household paper produced in some places is close to that of rice paper. If we can master its characteristics, it is also suitable for painting, and we can draw some effects different from rice paper. Such as: Yunnan Leather Paper, Wenzhou Leather Paper, Sichuan Jiajiang Leather Paper, Shanxi Hemp Paper, North Korea Paper in Northeast China and Beijing, etc. Beginners of Chinese painting or pen practice can choose cheap rough paper, such as tassel paper and meta-book paper. However, white newspaper, Taoist paper and drawing paper are not suitable for China painting paper.

⑷ Yantai

1. Types of inkstones

There are many kinds of inkstone, such as inkstone, pottery inkstone, brick inkstone and jade inkstone. Its forms are square inkstone, round inkstone, square inkstone and square inkstone. Guangdong Duanyan and Anhui She Yan are more famous, but they are more expensive.

2. The choice of inkstone

Painting with inkstones is not collecting inkstones. Generally, the texture is delicate and easy to ink. If it is too detailed to reject the ink, it is not easy to grind; If the ink is too rough, it will grind quickly, but the ink is also thick and it is easy to damage the brush. Making large-scale Chinese paintings needs more ink, so the inkstone pool should be deeper to store more ink. The inkstone should be covered, so that the ink can slowly dry and keep clean.

V. Pigments

The color of traditional Chinese painting can be divided into stone color and plant color.

1. Stone color

Stone color consists of minerals, including ochre, cinnabar, azurite, stone green, realgar and stone yellow.

2. Plant color

Plant colors include gamboge, rouge and cyanine.