Watercolor: Beauty Of the South 水彩画--江南

I very like Wu Guanzhong's landscape , who is a famous Chinese painter. Those works are really beautiful. He painted many beautiful pictures of South of China with the simplest form of architecture, including point, line, plane, color. Of cause this had relation with his hard work. He once said, "no one in the world paints from nature much more than me."

It is a tough job to paint from nature. Once he was in a village in Guizhou, where people raise pigs and chicken, these animals lived close to the toilet , there were many flies in there. He sat there drawing and had the greatest disregard for flies. The children looked at the pictures, but they were not interested in it. So they counted these flies on his back. There were 81 flies.

When he painted a mountain , he would clamb to the top of the mountain to paint. After he finished it, he had to go down slowly, with his painting in his hands because the oil painting was not dry, and his other tools were rolled down the mountain by gravity. It's hard to walk down the hill, carrying the painting in both hands. Who would like to go to such a place for painting now ? 《Ignore life for art》, it is a title of his book. Talented people are those who repeat the most times.

The spring in the South always comes earlier than the north, and it is always beautiful in my impression (although I've only been there twice.) Blue sky and white clouds, recovery of all things in the spring, fresh one and green. Walking in the quiet narrow alleys, seeing white walls and black tiles, smelling the scent of flowers, I know peach blossoms.

It is more interesting and more challenging to paint it without line work for the first time.

Now let's start!

非常喜欢吴冠中的江南风景画，真的好美。他用最简单的点，线，面，色的形式架构，勾勒出很多的江南美景。当然这与他勤奋刻苦是分不开的。他曾说，没有第二个画家有我写生多。

野外写生是件很艰苦的事情。有一次在贵州的一个村庄，那个地方人养猪，养鸡的厕所都在一起，苍蝇到处飞。他就坐在那里画画，小孩看着画，他们不感兴趣，就数他后背上的苍蝇，一共数了81个。画山峰的时候，他会跑到山顶上去做画，等到下来的时候，由于油画还未晾干，他不得不双手捧着画，（其他工具都提前被滚到了山下。）小心翼翼的从山上走下来，一路很辛苦。试问现在能有几个愿意在那样的环境下写生作画呢？他有一本书名字就是，“要艺术不要命“，看来确实如此。 所谓天才就是努力的力量。

江南的春天总是比北方来的早，印象中又总是 那么美。（虽然仅仅去过两次。）蓝天白云，万物复苏，绿意盎然。走在幽静的小巷中，白墙黛瓦，花香阵阵，抬头一看，原来是桃花红了。第一次尝试没有画线稿而直接作画，更有挑战性也更有乐趣。

让我们开始吧。

Material 所用的工具：

2只水彩笔，水彩颜料，水彩纸，水杯，纸巾。

Process 过程：

Paint the black roof with flat brush.

用铅笔画出画作的尺寸，然后再调好黑色，用扁头笔画出黑色的屋顶。

Draw the line of house.

画出房屋的线条。。（我应该换个更细的画笔，线条画粗了！水彩画就像个纯真的孩子，画完什么样就是什么样，很难再去修改。）

Paint the windows of these house.

画上窗户。

Draw the wall on the right and the alley in the middle.

画出右侧的围墙，中间的小路。

Draw gray bricks of the alley and then paint them, using dry ink with a brush.

给小路铺上地砖，一块一块的画，地砖形状可以随意一些，有大有小，不用那么规矩，显得更自然。再用枯笔法扫在地砖上，呈现古朴磨旧的痕迹。

画出墙内的桃花树枝。

Paint the flowers of the peach brunches with rose red and trees behind the house with light green and dark green.

用玫红色调和大量的水，用圆头笔尖轻轻蘸取后，点在枝干附近。随意的点，但要错落有致，又深有浅。 再画出房屋后面的树丛的枝干，再调和出浅草绿色，先上底色，然后再上一层深绿色，留出边缘。（后悔画了绿色树丛，如果还是桃花会更好看的吧。）

Paint the bricks at the bottom of these houses with yellow, blue and brown.

再画出房屋底部的青砖。然后我选了土黄，蓝灰，熟褐随意的给砖铺上颜色。

Lastly, paint swallows in the sky and people in the alley. It is finished.

最后给天空上色，再加上燕子，人物点缀一下就完工了。

I hope you enjoy this post and have a nice weekend!

Thank you !

@helene.