Over the weekend, and throughout this week we celebrated the lunar new year by teaching our autistic and special needs students how to draw a rabbit using traditional Chinese Water and Ink techniques. Yvonne Wan (Focus Comic Creator and social cultural anthropologist) and Douglas Hebert (Certified Art teacher) were delighted to see our students create traditional water and ink paintings of rabbits in celebration of the Year of the Rabbit, and social cultural diversity. We held group and one to one classes.
We had 18 students participate in our free Lunar New Year Water and Ink Art program. Our students had fun.
Comic inking techniques are rooted in the fine arts. Chinese ink painting practices have been around for over 2000 years and help comic artists to be their very best at inking once they mastered the medium. With Chinese inking, a single stroke can produce considerable variations in tonality, from deep black to silvery gray. Therefore, in this context shading means more than just dark-light arrangement: It is the basis for the nuance in tonality found in East Asian art. This was an introduction class. The beauty of Water and Ink techniques is that it is abstract, simplistic, it is easy and everyone can do it. Having said that, it is a skilled craft because each brush stroke matters due to ink being a permanent medium and the artist will need to achieve more with less. It takes time to become a master of ink, but the immediate results from learning the basic techniques is fun and therapeutic to those who love the arts.
We look forward to celebrating our students accomplishments this weekend with an in person graduation event in Avondale.
Check out the highlights film
Here is the class tutorial for those wanting to give water and ink painting techniques a try:
Happy New Year!