I’m sure every instructor has their own names for these things, but here are the basic stroke techniques as I was shown them.

First off, here’s a couple of examples of the techniques in the form of shrimp (or crayfish or whatever).

(note, the top one doesn’t have legs because he’s a super shrimp. Don’t mess with the super shimp ’cause he can fly –er swim…)

The approach
–This is not a type of layered painting like oil on canvas. You will find yourself starting with the foreground and filling in the background later.
–most strokes are final. We try to get it right the first time since layering instantly becomes “wet on wet” techniques, which is a whole different animal.

How to hold and move the brush:
–We hold our arm straight out with our thumb pointing 45 degrees up ward. The brush will point straight down. We are mostly gripping between the thumb and first two fingers with the ring finger and pinky lightly touching for control.
–do not squeeze. It’s a gentle, loose touch. One method of practice for getting the shape of your hand and the lightness of the grip is to hold the brush while also holding an egg in your palm. The egg should not drop or get crushed. (note, holding the brush too tightly will result in aching hands. Continuing to do so for years will result in pain.)
–from here we may tilt our arm/wrist in various ways to change the angle in which the brush’s tip touches the paper.
–Chinese *Calligraphy* uses a lot of wrist movement. Chinese *Painting* uses your arm. We make nice long, smooth, strokes by moving from the shoulder, not from the wrist. However when making finer isolated details, we may use the wrist more.
–we hold the brush three quarters of the way up when drawing thick lines and three quarters of the way down for thin lines. (or basically “near” the top or “near” the bottom, not “at” the top or bottom.)

Brush angles and center brush
There are two ways to make thick and thin lines. With pressure, or by tilting the brush. When we hold the brush directly vertical (90 degrees in relation to the page), this is call “Center Brush.” It will give us the thinnest lines (provided we can control our pressure).
From there we can tilt the brush and start getting thicker lines. Try 60 degrees, 40 degrees, 30 degrees and 15 degrees. (remember, when we made that nice wide gradient? The brush was at 15 degrees.)

Specifically with Center brush, we try to keep the very tip of the brush in the center of the line. But when we start tilting the brush for thicker lines, we keep the tip on one side of the line and move the brush to the side.

Center brush is good for changing directions because the tip of the brush will trail along behind you and point in the direction of the line you’re leaving behind. However, it’s much harder to change directions when you’re tilting the brush at an angle.

For example, the shrimps whiskers were made with center brush, while the sections of the body were made by tilting the brush less and less with each dab.

strokes vs marks
Most strokes have a definite start and end point, this gives the stroke a bone shape (like the shrimp’s arms). A mark is just a mark on the page. It has no start or end and will often feel more random and unintentional. Most times, a stroke with one or two endpoints will look better than a mark.

Don’t fight the endpoints, embrace them. Realize that in nature things sprint from other places. Grass has a wider start point at the base, so do tree branches. Even a knot on a tree will not be perfectly round, it will have a direction it was drown from (so it looks like a dab of a brush, not a dot)

pulling stroke
a pulling stroke is a thin line with a start and end point that may change direction. So it has that bone shape and it’s done in center brush.

pointing stroke
a pointing stoke is a thin line with a start point but no end point. They are made using a hard bristle brush in center brush position.
The shrimp’s whiskers are pointing strokes.

Reshaping your brush tip
Before making a stroke, look at the very tip of your brush. Is it perfectly pointy and straight? If not, fix it before making the stroke. Do this by touching it to an empty chamber in your pallet and rolling a little. Don’t use the dabbing cloth because that will pull ink out of the brush. Strokes will always look better if the tip is reshaped before you use it, so get in the habit.

Finally, here are those crayfish/shrimp again so you can get another look at how the strokes come together.

Since the brush can be wet or dry and the page can be wet or dry, we have a few obvious combinations that result from this.

Wet brush on dry page.
Wet brush on wet page.
Dry brush on dry page.
Dry brush on wet page.

Wet On Wet
It’s worth experimenting with all of them, but here are some wet on wet examples.

Here I made a dab that soak into the paper, then I ran a smoother black line into it (downward). So you can see how the line starts to spread as soon as it touches the wet page.

in the next one, I again had some wet ink on the page, and this time made a dot or dab into it. When completely contained in the wet area, it makes a nice starburst dot. But when done on the edge of the wet area, it will flow right passed the boundaries of the original stroke.

but even though the new wet ink will flow passed the boundaries of the stroke before it, it tends to flow to the wet area first. In this next example, I made an “S” with JUST WATER, then touched an ink brush to either end to see how the ink flows down the path that’s already been laid out for it.

Speed Kills Spreading!
This is really useful. If you have a wet brush and you make your strokes faster, then the paper doesn’t have enough time to absorb the ink –therefore it does NOT spread.

Vary of Speed
So naturally, if you vary the speed of the stroke, you’ll vary the amount of ink the paper can absorb and thus vary the thickness of the line. This example was made with a CONSTANT pressure. I know it’s obvious that changing pressure on the brush will give you a thicker line, but this was NOT the case (that’s why it’s so interesting).

so again, above is constant pressure, varying speed.

Fast with Vary of pressure
And so you can see the difference, below is varying pressure, but constant fast speed.

note how this one has crisp edges the whole way through, while the previous method gives us a fuzzy edge in the wider part of the line.

I’m sure each has it’s uses. I used the change in speed to make this feather/quill

I’m guessing I should have gone a little slower at the bottom to let it get even fuzzier, but you get the idea.

Wet on dry
I don’t have a picture to go with this, but if you make a stroke and then let it dry before making another stroke on top of it, the second stroke should effect the first as if it were effecting the dry page. So a fast stroke on a dry stroke should not bleed, while a slow stroke on a dry stroke should start to spread like normal.

–but I’ll have to double check this last one the next time I have the inks out.

Here are notes from a Chinese brush class I’m taking. I’m a total beginner, so I’m going to start with little details I gathered when first touching brush to page.

First thing’s first.
We had 3 types of brushes:
–a hard bristle brush (medium sized)
–a soft bristle brush (medium sized)
–a hard bristle detail brush (small)

All of the brushes are round, none have that flattened or pinched look that you see in a lot of arts & crafts sections of a store.

Like This:

NOT this:

Identifying the difference between a hard bristle brush and a soft bristle brush:
hard bristle is more springy and will return to being straight and pointy after/during the brush stroke. Soft bristle will bend as you touch it to the paper and stay bent after you lift it up.

If you’re making strokes that involve changes in pressure (bamboo leaves, etc) you’ll want to use the hard bristle brush because it will continue to contact the page as you lighten the pressure.

Paper:
There are a million types of paper, but lets just talk about two major categories, for ease of writing, I’ll call them treated and non-treated.
Non-treated paper is just paper, it will absorb the ink and the ink will spread.
Treated paper has a special coating on it to keep the ink from absorbing… it’s like beads of water on a waxed car. You can literally blow beads of ink around on the paper.

We’re starting with the cheaper, non-treated paper.

Paint on the softer side of the paper.

Here are some examples I found on amazon:

So the first thing you notice is that you touch the page and the ink just spreads…

at first this seems like a disaster, but it’s good for making fuzzy stuff, like these doodles.

ink and greys
there’s some history behind inks and how they use ink sticks and grinding stones like these:

HOWEVER we’re using black ink from a bottle, so I’ll only talk about what I’ve used.

These aren’t the exact inks we use, but you get the idea:

The ink is black and the only way to get gray is to dilute it with water. Our instructor uses a simple technique of having 3 containers for holding the “palette” (for lack of a better word). These containers are about the size of those single service puddings or yogurts (in fact, that’s what we use at home). This is what the one from class looks like:

The first container (or well or what-not) just has some black ink in it (don’t fill it up! in the image above, You’d still be able to see the white bottom of one of those side chambers), the other two chambers are about half full of water. We then dip the brush into the ink, then go directly into the 2nd container and swish it around in the water 5 or 6 times, then we go directly to the 3rd container and swish it around in the water once or twice and then clean the brush.

Now we have 1 black, 1 dark gray, and 1 light gray.

So the first step in any session is to mix and test your grays.

Use more ink or more water to adjust the grays to the darkness or lightness you’re looking for (depending on what your painting, etc)

Gradients
The point of these grays is to load up the brush with all three tones and make gradients.

Note: that’s light gray, 2 strokes of dark gray, then black, followed by a poor quality gradient. So DON’T try to make gradients that look like the one above.

The gradient will vary based on the tones of your grays to start with, and then how well you load them into the brush. The first is easy, the second is hard.

When the brush is loaded correctly, you get a nice smooth gradient from light gray to black. But when it’s not loaded correctly, you get more of a banding/rainbow-ish effect.

note: I’m left handed and all stroke started at the bottom and moved toward the top.

on the left we have an “okay” gradient, but not a great gradient. The transition from the black to the dark gray is nice and smooth, but the transition from dark gray to light gray is pretty abrupt.

In the middle, we have an all around bad gradient. It’s mostly light gray and black, and the dark gray is almost non-existent, so there’s a really abrupt transition from light to dark.

On the right we have another bad example. It’s mostly light gray, with a touch of dark gray and it’s too dry and breaks near the top.

The gradient technique (loading the brush)
Now that you know what it can look like, here’s how to do it.
–Clean out the brush and dab it mostly dry.
–dip the brush completely in the light gray.
–dab lightly on dabbing cloth.
–dip the brush half way into the dark gray.
–dab lightly (or dab tip) on dabbing cloth.
–touch the tip of the brush to the black ink.

You’ll notice right away that the final gradient will reflect how much you put on the brush, so if you did way more light gray than dark gray, you’ll get something like that middle example above, while that example on the right has hardly any black on the brush at all.

The gradient technique (using the loaded brush)
When you make the stroke, you hold your brush at a 15 or 30 degree angle compared to the page, touch down and pull upward so the brush makes the widest mark possible.

NOTE: I’m left handed, so my black is on the right side. Odds are you’re right handed, so your gradients will be darker on the left side.

Honestly, it’s a lot of practice just to get your grays the correct tone and then to actually get the brush loaded correctly and make that once nice smooth gradient. Then when you finally get it, you’ll realizes the brush is only good for one stroke and needs to be loaded again, which means there’s no guarantee the next gradient will be good.

Dabbing is key
I didn’t learn this my first day, so I’m making note of it specifically. Since the grays are mostly water, you need to dab them on a dabbing cloth before you make the stroke on the page.

Because the gradients involved putting the whole brush into the light gray, I just assumed the brush was supposed to be really wet all the time. I was wrong. Like everything, it depends on what you intend on doing. In the end, I found I got the best results when the brush was NOT very wet.

How wet is to wet? gray example:
Overly Wet brush: ink really spreads and you can probably make 3 or 4 soppy strokes before it starts to be useful, then you’ll get maybe 2 nice strokes.
Not so wet brush: you’ll get 1 or 2 nice strokes from it, then you should have to clean, and reload with ink.
Dry brush: will not make smooth strokes. Will break a little in the line it leaves behind. Can be very cool for adding texture.

Also realize those examples you just read are with the grays, which are mostly water. The straight black ink acts differently. It’s much silkier and easier to put on the page without it spreading all over the place.

Overall

Embrace it. It seemed scary to me that the ink just spreads all over the place. I thought: how can anyone ever do what they indent on doing!? But eventually you realize the best gradients are the ones where you give the ink and paper enough water to spread together.

The instructor has a very calm, centered demeanor, and tells us that you are only doing half the work, you are only making half of the creation. The ink and the paper will react however they want to. Don’t fight it, embrace it. See what the paper wants to make rather than trying to force it to do what you want it to do.

I’m sure that’s something she says to beginners, but in all honesty, once I stopped fighting it, I really enjoyed it. There’s something Zen and calming about letting the ink and paper have half the creative control. Before long we were just making fuzzy creatures and laughing at how unintentionally cute they were.

also, this bee was a complete accident… I tried to reproduce it but just made a mess. Still, I rather enjoyed the making of this bee the most, while the others felt like I was trying too hard.