Sumi-E: Japanese Ink Painting with Aki Kato

[Music] hello everybody my name is aki kato and i am a japanese artist i live in the beautiful today i'm here to introduce you samia paintings and smear world consists of two characters first part sumi means ink second part e means picture and also it can be a painting or drawing now this art form is created in china a long long time ago and came to japan and there's a thousand of artists still practice this art form all over asia it is very popular because it is simple and unique well it's simple because we only need a few items that most of stuff that we can find in around our house and then second reason is simple because we only need to know few techniques i will demonstrate you these techniques and maybe i can demonstrate to paint a couple of things let's say first i will introduce you stuff that we need there are the three essential items that we have to have first of all it's sumi it's ink now this is a sumi it looks like a candy bar but this is just concentrated and dehydrated coal and this is really hot like a lock and how can we paint with this well we have to make a liquid form and in order to do that we need to call suzue this kind of look like same material but actually this is hard rock slate is usually people use it now i'm going to drop cup of water drop of water and then we start grinding it after 10-15 minutes we reach to desired consistency which is very very dark pure black ink now it is taking time and it is time consuming so people discover the liquid form and this is what it is it's called boku jew and this is ready to use and another essential thing that we have to have is well what we are going to paint on now we use this same paper almost transparent and this is called washi and the washi is made with rice well it's not edible so don't even think about eating it and the washi has front side which is a little bit shinier and the smoother and the back side is rougher it's kind of easy to tell if you can touch it now of course we use front side another option that we have this is called squishy and this is also made with the rice but it's a little bit more cardboard like and it's decorative it's got the gold trim if i turn around the backside it's got speckle of silver now we do use this not only smear painting but as a greeting card so today we are using this hanshi washi paper and another important thing that we have to have is a brush now chinese brush compared to westerns this is very simple because we only have one shape though we have small and medium and large they're all rounded and good way to find the good brush is we have to have a very sharp pointed tip and some cheap ones it's going to separate after we use a few strokes so i'm going to use this today this is small brush to demonstrate a few techniques other things we need is a palette i normally use white porcelain plates like that or maybe like that i recommend you using white and so that we can see actual consistency of ink and we have to use the right shade if you don't have these you can even use this styrofoam disposable picnic plates this works just well and the other thing is that we are going to cover table with the newspaper prints a newspaper print is really nice thing to have this one is newspaper print so it does not have anything on it if you don't have that you can use just regular newspaper old newspaper that works well and let's see what else we need we need rug and paper towel to wipe that and clean the brush other thing though i have to warn you ink once you get on the cloth it's almost impossible to clean so probably it's nice to have a apron or some type of cover that you can protect your clothes i think now we are ready to start smear painting now i pour already this liquid sumi into little cup like that and i place right in front of it and then let's see i have a hanship paper or washi paper and then i have a little felt because it is so thin and it's going to breathe through so let's place like that and i will show you three basic technique first let's try double loading i make brush flat like that now we are ready to do some demonstration of basic techniques before that i'm going to make right consistent swimming i have a little bit of water in a bottle and i am going to uh let's see okay so let's start doing some basic techniques this is bowl of swimming i'm going to add couple of drip of water on the tray and i pick up sumi and i mix it this is still very very dark so now i need to make it even thinner and i transfer one dab of ink and then i'm going to add two more drip water and then the third one this i'm making a light one i make three drops of water and then i'm transfer one of ink and this is light one it is very important to test your brush before you apply on the paper because ink like watercolors once you put it on a paper we cannot erase it or we cannot make light so only way we can only add colors see that's why we need a newspaper to test it i think still this is too dark so i'm going to put two more drops of water and i just mix it and let's see how dark or how light it's got i think it's okay so now i'm going to clean the brush i always have two or three cup or buckets of water with me so that i can clean the brush and i would like to keep one bowl of water clean i don't want to contaminate with ink so this brush is clean now first technique is double loading now this brush is saturated with water and now i put one side of the brush into the ink and then i just let's see how it's gonna go no okay let me try one more time okay and i don't know if you can see it or not because of this uh uh i'm using dark field paper it's very hard to see but if you see carefully one side is lighter than others and this is called double loading technique and then next one i'm trying to use different type okay next i would like to try dry brush technique and i am going to clean my brush and i pick up a little bit of ink and then i test it it has lots of ink in my brush so i wipe as much as i can you can see it's lost lots of ink now i think i'm ready this is called dry brush technique and this is very useful when we paint bamboos so these are just a couple of basic techniques that we use and the other technique that i would like to show you is a blur technique let me see i dropped clean water and i draw the circle so now paper is saturated let's see what's going to happen if i drop a little bit of black ink in the center of it you can see how the ink spread on the paper it looks like an eyeball but if i don't use any if i don't saturate paper with water and now let's see what's going to happen ink does not spread as well as the one saturated with water so that's another technique that you can use probably it's good to paint animal hair or eyes and so many other things that you can use the technique for so now using these techniques let me introduce now using these techniques i would like to demonstrate to paint couple of different things the first i would like to try the bamboo a bamboo is very popular subject in a smear and i need to get new papers and i'm going to use dry brush technique on this painting and let's see i pick up the ink this is very dark one and i need to test my brush i got still too much ink i try to wipe a little bit off okay that's getting better now what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to paint a bamboo stem and i hold brush like that and come back a little bit and drag back drag and bag drug drug this is the stem of a bamboo now let's see the bamboo has lots of branches and let me paint little bit of branch in the same way but still it's a little bit small how about from here okay now let me try bamboo in the far ground i always tell students that it's really nice to have object in foreground middle ground and background because they create a depth the sense of depth is very important on a two-dimensional painting on the paper like this so now in order to paint a bamboo in the background i have to make paint even lighter so i'm gonna pick up the the water here and i just take a little bit and i again i have to test it on the paper oh yeah this is lighter all right that's great but it's got too much ink on the brush so again i have to wipe and then test wipe and test i think that's good so let's let me drawed bamboo in in the foreground and of course sides get a little bit smaller too the color gets a little lighter and it's get a little smaller so i have to adjust blush tip pointed now this bamboo is a little bit farther down okay good now let's paint leave and i use this medium okay good so now i'm going to paint few leaves now you maybe notice that i'm doing pretty fast the reason is that if i don't if i don't move my brush fast let me see what's going to happen i will show you see it's get breathe again and it's get bigger and i don't like that i like sharp edge when it comes to bamboo okay now this is uh what is uh i'm sorry now i have to move my brush pretty fast because if i don't it's going to bleed through and i cannot create sharp edges let me show you how it's going to if i keep brush too long on paper as you can see i'm not creating sharp edges and i just don't like that on a bamboo leaves so i painted this bamboo a couple of days ago this is how it's going to be and using these techniques of dry brush and let me try really fast for another painting that i did oh i'm sorry let me try another painting a landscape with pine trees that is very popular subject probably many of you have seen it when you go to chinese restaurant they like to put that on the wall it's a beautiful countryside and rocky cliff with a pine tree so let's start and i use this dark color paint or ink and create outline of the rocky cliff something like that and then let me paint pine trees okay this is branch out like that way okay something like that and then i'm going to use the dry brush technique because of this rock is very in front of you sorry and this is the pine tree now i'm going to use dry brush technique to create rock formations and i'm going to use this dark color ink and again i have to test that now you can see the dry brush so i'm going to paint you can go pretty bold there is no bad art only good art and i would like to encourage the people that whatever you do please do not worry about what other people think as long as you enjoy it that's what the important thing and i'm going to create more medium shade ink and i have to test that okay got too much water in the brush like that and so i'm going to just add a little bit of water a little bit of ink and make pine tree now let me just start painting pine needles this is just a repeat okay um so this is really nice to have a good quality brush so that i can paint pine needles and fine lines such as the branch of pine tree okay so let me try to paint another rock formation on the other side this time it's little further down so i will make it a little bit lighter again i pick up a little bit of water and add tap of black ink and to create lighter shade and let me test it i think that is very good shade yeah it's though it's got a little bit more water than i want let's see how is that now i think it's good so let me start from here so this is another cliff on the other side oh it went too dark that's what i was talking about once i put dark ink i cannot erase it only thing i can do is i have to paint all over again so you know how important testing on a newspaper is okay like that and of course if you want you can add waterfall or you can make little chinese pagoda or cloud or birds whatever you want now let me show you the one i painted the other day and this is what i painted with the rock formations sharp cliff and pine trees and chinese pagoda and so this is what i i'm sorry and this is what i painted the other day just sharp cliff and pine trees and chinese pagoda and now artists are painting all kinds of different things this is old school smear painting and you don't need to stick with that you can paint animals you can paint insects or you can paint some pattern designs so i hope i help you to understand smear painting and enjoy painting thank you

Channel: Arts Center of Coastal Carolina

Views: 53,668

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Id: ISoKFyN-YVY

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022