1. We began our class drawing the circles with the squirrel brush. It is good to start the class with this meditative act and calm our mind into the painting class. We spent about 20 - 30mins to refresh our memories on how to use the squirrel brush, with the Chinese ink that has been thinned out with water.
2. We learnt many different colour pigments and their names such as cinnabar, indigo, malachite...lovely lovely names. We then learnt how to turn these pigments into usable paint colours by grinding the pigments on a sandblasted glass surface with a glass muller, mixed with water ( a couple of teaspoons) and gum arabic ( about 1/2 teaspoon) . Note that gum arabic is a medium to bind the colour to the painted surface, if too much is added the paint will eventually crack, but it too little is added the paint is runny and will rub off. Best to test the mixed paint on a piece of paper and rub it with finger after the paint is dry to test whether there is sufficient gum arabic. We then spent a good hour just grinding and preparing paint.
3. We then learnt to mix the paint colours we needed for our painting, and we started to 'block' the colour - by filling in the basic colours of our painting composition. This exercise also took a while as we had to test out and mix until we could match the colours to our satisfaction. Note that for the background colours we used normal sable brush to fill up and block the colours.
We will be adding details next week.
