I wanted to share some of the wonderful Chinese Brush Painting art I saw while in China last year.  Most of these paintings are the simple painting technique with a few examples of the more detailed paintings at the end.  Please excuse my sometimes fuzzy photography and choppy cropping! Enjoy!

I have been fascinated with Chinese Brush Painting since the first time I saw a painting.  There are two styles of Chinese Brush Painting: one is very detailed and the other is simple strokes that let your imagination fill in the details.  Artists spend years learning this art and begin by copying their Masters.  Unlike many of us, the Chinese consider duplicating or imitating the work of others to be an honor and the way to learn.  It’s an interesting philosophy.  I’d like to share my knowledge of the tools of Chinese Brush Painting.

This is one of the best books I've found on Chinese Brush Painting published by Sterling Publishing.

This is a sample stroke used in Chinese Brush Painting (from the book shown above).

These are the types of brushes used for painting, the round tips hold a lot of ink.

Black is the traditional color of ink used in this type of painting; to the left of the ink stick is the ink stone. You add a little water to the well of the ink stone and grind the ink stick against the stone to make the ink!

These are colored ink sticks I got while in China, most ink sticks are highly decorated to celebrate creativity. The inks come in pretty boxes with glass fronts.

To the left is a chop, usually the name of the artist is carved on the bottom of the chop. The chop is used as a seal, the last thing the artist does is smear some cinnabar ink (to the right of the chop) onto the bottom of the seal, then stamp it on the finished painting.

Here is a seal carved two ways.

 What do you think?  Anyone else doing some Chinese Brush Painting?

The last 4 weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for me.  I’ve been diving in Turks and Caicos (get out your world map!) aboard the beautiful Turks and Caicos Aggressor II which is a 120′ yacht designed for taking scuba divers to some amazing dive locations.  I saw reef sharks, stingrays, turtles, octopus, and so much more.  I saw some great trends and interesting combinations of color and texture on this trip and will share my impressions with you soon.  We were home only two days when we were off to China!

We spent 12 days in China going from Shanghai to Beijing spending 6 days on the Yangtze river.  It was an amazing trip filled with seeing some very impressive hand crafts and some even more impressive designs from Mother Nature.  I’ll be very honest, China was not at the top of my list of places I wanted to visit, but I’m glad my mother-in-law picked it as our family vacation destination. 

I never pictured the people of China as creative, I don’t know why since I know that many, many of our traditional crafts here in the United States have roots going back to China, yet in my mind I just saw factories pumping out cheap imports for the U.S..  After this trip, I have a new appreciation for handcrafts.  You’ll be seeing some great photos and videos from our trip to China in the weeks ahead!  Hand sewn embroidery, hand weaved silk rugs, and Chinese brush stroke painting are a few of the treasures I enjoyed and am so excited to share with you.

Once back we prepared for Thanksgiving.  It’s a tradition of ours to go to a family friend’s home for Thanksgiving.  It’s a big crowd of family and friends all bringing a special dish to add to the table.  This year I’m thankful for so many things including this wonderful blog! I hope each of you had a great Thanksgiving too.

This wonderful whirlwind of traveling has given me some great inspiration for my crafts.  I look forward to incorporating all the sights, colors, textures, motion, and emotions into some jewelry pieces, needlepunch designs, and some brush stroke art.  And I’ll get started just as soon as I can catch my breath!