It is about time I painted something!   I’ve been studying Traditional Chinese Ink Brush painting and find it intriguing.  I want art lessons from a real brush painter now.  It is harder than it looks.  I painted this bamboo picture using a liquid ink and bamboo brush on typical Chinese student drawing paper.  It’s simple and big.  Ink dried fast and looks ok.

Then I was given some bamboo paper from a colleague.  She brought it back from her home town one weekend for me. I unrolled it to find the sheets are 5 x 2 feet…  Large paintings!  The paper is as thin as tissue paper and I am wondering how this is going to take to ink.

My ink is in stick form and you grind it in a circular motion in a special vessel with water called an ink stone until you get your desired value.  Making gray in a variety of values is fairly easy.  I looked at some Landscape paintings on line to get the jest of painting.  The paper adsorbed the watery ink rather fast and dried real slow, something I am not accustomed too.  But the grays were really nice, just figuring out how to control the bleeding is gonna take some time.