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How to Use This Book

This book is for kids at least seven years old, teens, and adults—-anyone who wants to learn about the traditional Chinese way to write words and make paintings. You can read about and make the paintings on your own, or you can read the book with a parent or teacher, a brother, sister, or friend, and talk about what to do and why. Someone who knows about painting can be a big help.

This book shows you how to hold the brush Chinese-style and make the basic brush-strokes. You will learn to write some words and numbers in Chinese. Then you will learn how to use the same basic brushstrokes to create pictures of classic Chinese subjects, including orchids, bamboo, pine trees, and landscapes. This book explains how Chinese artists think about these subjects and what principles and traditions they follow in painting them. After you copy some examples and understand the principles, you can make your own designs. When you have completed some paintings, you can choose from several suggested ways to mount them for display.

You may wonder why the paintings in this book are not in color. The reason is that traditional Chinese paintings used only black ink. Different mixes of gray were treated like colors. Later, the Chinese added a few colors. After European styles became known in China, brush painting became more and more colorful and started copying Western water-color styles. The older and simpler way of painting started to be ignored. This book tries to keep the older tradition alive. Its beauty comes from lines and shapes, shades of gray, and contrast between black, gray, and white. Chinese brush paintings are interesting just as black-and-white photography is interesting in its own way, without using color.

To do brush painting, you must learn to control the brush with your eyes, your arm, and your mind. When all three work together, you will be surprised at how great your Chinese-style paintings can look. You will learn new tricks with the brush that you didn’t know before. Brush painting takes a lot of practice, but it can also be a lot of fun and make you feel happy because of what you have learned and accomplished.