Sumi Paintings

6/2/15 India ink, sumi brush, Fabriano hot press paper

I’m working on a couple of travel follow-up posts (a teaser: one is on what I bought in Paris, and the other is about my travel sketch kit successes and failures), but before I get to those, I’m going to interrupt our regular programming with a few paintings from my ongoing ink-drawing class at Gage. While I was in France, I regretting missing two classes on a topic I really love: sumi painting. The instructor had given me the handouts for the classes I would miss, and I practiced some traditional sumi-e painting strokes on my own the day before I left for France, but it was difficult without demos.

Yesterday in class, I felt a little behind since I hadn’t practiced copying the masters first, but I tried my best on these sumi paintings (we actually used India ink, not traditional sumi), which were copied from photos. Even though I need a lot of practice to master using a sumi brush, which behaves very differently from a traditional paint brush (or the waterbrush I’m more used to!), I do love the elegance of defining a form as simply as possible and with as few brush strokes as possible.