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Traditional Chinese Painting has been a prevalent style of painting since the Sui Tang and the Five Dynasties which was a period of time during 581 to 979 AD. Meaning this style of painting has been used in Chinese culture for near enough 1,500 years, which really puts into scale China's vast history with art. It is still practiced and some modern artists adopt the style of guo hua (national painting/native painting) but Western styles have become popular in the 20th Century and more contemporary and experimental artworks are being produced.

I think China is proud of their artistic history and want to keep it alive for as long as possible. When making my own Chinese fan the instructor was a professional and competed in fan making, proving that these activities still take place and aren't used for touristic purposes, but they are happy is present their art to foreigners and teach them about it but they will continue to practice this art despite how famous and appealing it becomes to Western tourists.

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Final Outcome

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I designed little spirits for my spirit world by taking real life animals and giving peculiar features or mixing them with something else. Unfortunately, these characters did not find a place in my final artwork so they are not featured in my FMP but it was an interesting worksheet to see what type of creatures would live in this world.

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Scanned In Outline of Final Artwork

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Illustrating the temple has been challenging, The perspective looked off and it was difficult to get the overall shape especially the roof, I wanted to create my own temple design and not copy existing ones, this is a fictional world so I want Chinese and Japanese influence not a direct adaptation, but I've still captured the essence of a Asian temple.

I then had to make the building derelict, this temple has been forgotten and no one has worshipped in it for god knows how long. Adding cracks in the walls, wood that has snapped away, a damaged roof and broken windows I managed this look, along with some rubble scattered on the floor, in post I might even add some graffiti to further show the disrespect the traditional culture faces.

I'm pleased with the result especially after struggling on it for so long and getting quite frustrated with it, so I'm glad I overcame that and produced something I'm happy with.

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On Wednesday I attended an Applicant Day at De Montfort University. Apart of the Applicant Day was a taster session for the course you were doing. Most of the creative students were studying something graphics related so I had to do a graphics related task which wasn't any help for me at all but regardless a fun activity and a chance to learn the names and faces of people that could be on your course or in the same building.

We had search a bin of scrap paper and find things that we liked and disliked and cut them out and stick them on this Venn Diagram template. Because of how random the images in the bin were it was hard to find things that you actually had an opinion on whether you liked or didn't like them so I included some doodles to fill out the space a bit and make it a bit more visually interesting instead of random images glued onto a sheet of paper.

A machine called a Riso Printer, which is based on an older piece of technology called a Digital Duplicator but its been developed and improved to create a Riso Printer. Essentially what it does is overlays two designs on the top of each other, this is something that can easily be achieved in programmes like Photoshop but this printer does it for you. So I created the collage and then a separate piece of paper with the 'For and Against' design was also put into the printer, the colour settings were changed to make the final product have a green and pink colour scheme.

Unfortunately. mine didn't turn out so well and the colours used wiped a lot clarity from the images and the doodles I put on them.

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Stamp Trials

In China we offered the opportunity to purchase a custom made stamp with both our English name and what the Chinese version would be, the handle was also the animal of the year the person was born in so 2006 is a dog so my stamp's handle is a dog. It also came with some red ink in a really nice box with an accompanying booklet on personality traits for the different animals. I noticed on the majority of the paintings I saw there was a little red signature stamp so I bought this custom made stamp to do the same thing. Including little details like that will hopefully make the artwork more unique and even more so that its custom made and not some one I found on the internet, its uniquely mine.

When it came to testing out the stamp it didn't come out amazing and the shape was very broken but when added with a good amount of water it turns out looking just fine. So it's tricky to get right but its worth it as its a small but impactful detail to include. I will put some tape over the English name and just have the Chinese version because I think an English word in a painting that's inspired by Chinese art is a bit silly.

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Inking Using a Chinese Brush

When looking around the Shanghai M50 Creative Space I purchased a paintbrush from an art shop, there was lots of expensive options but I bought the cheapest one I could find. Using an authentic Chinese brush as a tool for my artwork is something that no one else would be able to do and could get me a couple more marks as even the tools I'm using are on theme. The brush is surprisingly nice to use despite its price. It didn't take me ages to learn how to control the brush but I still need to get better but the outcome is really good and the ink looks really nice on the page and then if there's gaps I fill it in using a normal outliner pen.

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I was nervous to start illustrating Zhenkai City in the background as I'm not too familiar with illustrating environments but drawing buildings and collecting photos of them and the skylines there involved in while in China has defiantly improved my skills and improved my knowledge on how a skyline should look. I started with sketching in some rectangles of different heights and shapes to get a rough idea of how it would look, I then lightly erased these guidelines and started to make the buildings different shapes and some three dimension to some of them. I wanted to create some buildings in shapes you wouldn't normally see to show the futurism of it but that will be bale to be portrayed a lot better with how I design the buildings which I have only just started to do, I think that's where the artwork may lack a bit but I'll try my best. The colours I choose will also play into how futuristic the city looks. I've taken influence from Shanghai's skyline more than the others as that was the most advanced city that we visited and therefore the closest to what I'm trying to achieve, It was also the city that I was able to view the skyline properly so I have a lot of photos of the city from both day and night that I can use for references.

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I started the sketch for my final piece starting with the foreground and working backwards until the city skyline. The cliffs in the foreground feature a withering tree and the other one will have a derelict temple but right now I'm struggling to get the shape and design right. The colour palette of this area will be dull and muted which will contrast to the bright colours of the city in the background, as this is an illustration I'm not able to convey the story of the world I have created in a conventional manner. The dull colours compared to the bright ones will show that the traditional temples and former spiritual presence of this land is no longer respected and has been forgotten while the many colours that will create the bustling futuristic city to show what has replaced the old.

Drawing the rocks was fun and I think they turned out well, It's not exactly realistic but I wanted to include some sort of weird style of my own as a lot of the paintings I saw in the museums of China had some out of the ordinary designs. To start off with the rocks were very distracting but I simply erased some lines to create some gaps in between the rocks and it made it a lot less distracting. I then drew some rocks in between the two main cliffs to fill space and to give the cliffs some sort of place of origin and not just randomly coming into the page, to make it look like there's a bigger mountain terrain that we can't see.

The tree I had taken inspiration from a painting I saw in China, I took influence from the twisted shape, I originally wanted to have leaves on the tree as the way I saw it done in the Chinese paintings was simple but effective and when involved in the whole artwork looked really seamless but I think from a story stand point it makes sense for the tree to be dead. Again, I'm proud of the way the tree has turned out ad the whole piece is looking really promising.

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I randomly came up with a couple characters for my fictional world. I looked at Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. I was just doing trials but I decided to go in Photoshop and make it look like a ancient scroll just so it looked like some form of outcome and could tie into the project instead of just being a worksheet. I saw this as an easy way to have some sort of world building, to have some form of established language and then I will feature these characters on the buildings of my final art work.