The Rock Clinic

[corvi]

Hooray, Chinese brush painting classes have resumed! Today the instructor decided everyone should practice rocks, which I've done before, but was happy to return to in more depth.

The instructor demonstrated three different techniques for painting rocks:


This rock is drawn with a stroke called "spread out hemp fiber." I missed the very beginning of the demonstration, so I'm not sure how to do it, but I like the way the way it's a long graceful stroke but still has jagged frayed edges without thinning or fading.



This rock is drawn with the "axe head" stroke. This one I know how to do! I used it for the rocks around waterfalls. It's a long straight stroke done with the side of the brush, and then you sweep the brush sideways at the end to get jagged thorn shapes. It's good for rough rocks with corners and cracks, or, done sideways, for slate and layered beds.



This is the "veins of a lotus leaf" stroke. It's done lightly with the side of the brush. It's for sandstone and other soft rocks carved by wind and water.

Other useful rock techniques:

• rocks should have three "sides", a left, a right, and a top, like an isometric drawing of a cube
• lines at the top of a rock should be thinner
• you can shade the rock either according to where light falls, according to what's closest to the viewer, or both

After she finished demonstrating rockmaking, we sat down to practice rocks. I was mixing ink while the instructor went and dug through one of her piles of art and got out a different piece and put it in front of me. 

It was an abstract scene of waves crashing against rock, with a roiling and menacing energy, like it was about to escape the page and knock you over. I had no idea brushpainting could produce anything so intense. The sea was a broken indigo. The stones were jagged, with gaps and hollows lashed by spray. I have no idea what kind of stroke was used for the rocks, unless she was firing the paintbrushes at the page with a crossbow.

"No, do this one," the instructor said. I stared at it transfixed.

"Uh." I said. "Um. I was going to practice the lotus leaf vein stroke."

"I'm forcing you to do this one!" she said, and laughed cheerfully.

I love the instructor's willingness to just straight up tell me what to do and what to work on to become a better painter, but I had no idea how to begin to make something like this. It didn't seem like something you could actually make on purpose.

"It looks... complicated," I said.

"OK. Do this one instead, it's the same kind of rocks. Next week, the ocean."

So she gave me a different piece to learn from, and I did these rocks jutting up out of an implicit ocean (axe head stroke):

They don't look like the same kind of rocks at all.  I don't think I'm actually any closer to painting the shattered-indigo sea lashing against the stone.

(Narratively, I'm not sure how this turns out. Either this is the part of the movie where the training montage happens, or a bunch of other stuff happens first, and after the credits roll, it cuts to me, after every other problem in my life has been resolved, old and wise and finally at peace, painting that scene.)

Comments

[dorchadas]

Every time I see those "What kind of superpower do you want?" questions, my answer is always "training montage."

(Or speed-learning I guess, but training montage sounds better)