Lian Zhen Workshop Day One: Chinese Painting

My first Chinese painting

This is day one of the five day Lian Zhen workshop in Denver. Lian is very organized, he does a demo, then has the class go to their tables and do what he just did. We are all painting the same subject, which sounds a bit to formulaic but it works very well as it drives the lesson home yet everyone's paintings look different.

Day one and two are Chinese Painting, using Chinese paints on shuan paper which is a very thin paper made from shuan grass in China.

My second Chinese painting

There are 22 people in the workshop. I've never been in such a large painting workshop, but Lian has it figured out and no one gets shortchanged. The demos are easy to watch and he comes around to everyone and though his individual instruction is brief, it is helpful and accurate.

Lian uses a mirror above him so everyone can see what he is doing

The second painting we did was using Chinese ink and Chinese paint on shuan paper. It was a waterfall landscape that took us all afternoon to complete. In the beginning, I couldn't imagine how this landscape was going to look like much, but after we put the color in, the image was pleasing enough. I overheard many people saying how much fun they were having!