Capture the essence of animals like never before! Using Chinese and watercolor techniques and materials, you can create animals with elegance and grace. Let award-winning artist Lian Quan Zhan show you how with his clear and basic step-by-step instructions. Artists at all levels will benefit from Lian's deep understanding of both art forms. He guides you through the process by beginning with the basic properties of Chinese materials such as rice paper and ink, and leading to more advanced techniques such as loading a brush with multiple colors. He also teaches watercolor pouring techniques so you can create vibrant animals and beautiful backgrounds. So much of Chinese painting stems from observation and interpretation of nature. Apply these principles by painting cats, birds, tigers, and many other animals in seventeen step-by-step demonstrations. Find your inspiration within the animals of this book, and breathe the spirit of the East and West into your own art.

A second addition, also known as Ning Yeh's "Gold Edition" updates his original guide of step-by-step instructions for Chinese Brush Painting.

Twelve art projects with step-by-step instructions and advice on materials, subjects, and methods.

How to use Asian tools, equipment and techniques to create modern paintings in the Oriental tradition. 188 illustrations provide close-up details of trees, skies, water, snow, and architecture to show how the author achieves his haunting, atmospheric effects.

"How-to" manual provides all levels of students with detailed methods for painting such simple subjects as bamboo and plum blossoms as well as more ambitious motifs. 150 illustrations, including 82 in full color.

Minimum stroke - maximum effect Learn how to make each brushstroke count when painting classically beautiful landscapes using a combination of traditional and modern watercolor techniques. Master artist and teacher Lian Quan Zhen shows how to blend Eastern and Western art theories, materials and techniques to create landscapes with graceful simplicity. Chinese Landscape Painting Techniques for Watercolor includes 27 start-to-finish demonstrations, which show how to capture the spirit and mood of the landscape in all types of weather and in all four seasons. It also features a wide variety of landscape subjects from America and around the world.

"How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China? Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there."