Painting lotus 7, finish the painting

Paint a bud, paint some more leaves, dab some water at the bottom.

Stamp your chop and take a photo.

Thank you for looking.

Painting lotus 6, flower stems

Paint the opaque yellow and the black stems.

Painting lotus 5, white yellow for flower heart

Prepare gamboge yellow and titanium white colour for the flower hearts.

A tiny bit of opaque white makes the yellow brighter.

Painting lotus 4, outline and highlight petals

Now come back to the petals, they are drier but not complete dried.

Use a fine tip samll brush to outline and highlight the petals.

Painting lotus 3, leaf

Leave the petal alone and work on the leaves.

Use a large brush, load with very light ink in the whole body of the brush and then dip in some very dark ink at the tip.

The brush is slanted so as to have a bigger stroke and ink shade gradience.

Painting lotus 2, petals

Each petal is done by one single stroke. The colour runs out and produces a watery effect.

Painting lotus 1, carmine colour

Dilute the carmine colour with wet brush till you get it transparent and runnable.

Step by step lotus, 7, outline lutus buds

Step by step lotus, 6, leaves without outline

These are done by medium and large sized Chinese brush. The leaves are by sheep hair, and the stem by wolf hair.

Step by step lotus, 5, outline flowers

Step by step lotus, 4, outline leaves

Step by step lotus, 3, outline of waterlily

This is a waterlily, done by small outline brush, (water colour size 4)

Step by step lotus, 2, outline exercise

Outline exercise done by an outline brush, equivalent to water colour round tip size 4.

Step by step lotus, 1, the real flower

This is a beautiful water lily I took from Cairns in Queensland of Australia.

However in Chinese painting, we find more often another kind of lotus that has a bud with seeds in it.

This link brings you to more flower pictures.

http://images.google.com.au/images?hl=en&q=lotus+flower

I do not dare to post other people's picture on my website.

Bamboo joints detail

This is a bamboo branch from one of my student's garden. The name is Buddha's belly bamboo. It has fat and round nodes at the bottom.

At each node, there are one or two small branches. They came out from the opposite side of the bamboo. It looked elegant, balanced and pretty.