How To Paint A Chinoiserie or Chinese Wallpaper Style Bird!

Hi, I'm Diane Hill. I'm an artist specialising in chinoiserie and in this video I'm going to be showing you how to paint a chinoiserie style bird. If you want more detail on how I paint chinoiserie art then please sign up to my mailing list as I'll be sending more tips about my process and I'll also be launching an online course soon so we can learn in much more depth. This paint style is super rare. I know there's not much about it online but I know there's loads of So I'm going to be painting a pigeon. It's going to be a really colourful pigeon. I'm using gouache paints. They're really really watered down paints, kind of like watercolour I guess so you could also do this with watercolour. I love using gouache because I really like the opacity and the vibrancy of the colours as well. I feel like they last a really long time and you can bring them back to life once they're dried out with with just a touch of water so basically like watercolours. And then I also use natural animal hair brushes, Chinese or Japanese brushes also known as calligraphy brushes and the reason I love these is because they hold so much paint in comparison to synthetic types but there are some synthetic ones that can also do a really good job. I just prefer to use the natural brushes and so I'm painting with really watered down gouache paint and I'm filling in the whole area of the bird, just the whole outline, giving it a hair dry. The hair dryer is my best friend and then I start to add the deeper shades so this is the same kind of green but then what I do is I just add some burnt umber or some black and just darken it up just the same tone. I'm not showing my palette in this video but I very much intend to in future videos. This is actually like my first proper YouTube so if you're watching thank you so much. So I'm blending in the deeper shade using a brush that has only water so I use two Chinese brushes one that holds the paint and one that holds pure clean water so it has to be super super clean and what I'm doing is just dragging out the paint and when I feel the brush needs to be cleaned off which is what I would have done just then I just clean it off dab away any excess and just kind of blend it out. I'm working on silk paper it's what I do all of my paintings on it's the traditional way for painting this kind of schmuzzery art and I just absolutely love the way it accepts watercolour or gouache paint it's just like it sinks into the silk and it like it's almost like it dyes it and so you can just see this subtle texture of the silk showing through and it's just the most luxurious thing so I used to work at a handmade wallpaper company and I would do like really high-end luxurious rooms of wallpaper it was always this silk sometimes with embroidery so it's very much the luxurious way to paint and I have sheets of silk small sheets of silk available on my website if you want to test it out to buy it in larger panels is just super expensive but I really want you all to have a go because it's amazing and you can create a kind of you know a small artwork and and sell it and make prints of it so I'm just adding in different tones to the head of this pigeon I've got some yellow and pink and every time I'm just blending out the paint with that water only brush and this can go on for quite some time until I'm happy and these are just the base layers so I go over the whole bird creating kind of shades and shadows where I can see it in my reference image sorry shadows and highlights where I can see them in my reference image and just keep going and blending them out and then the fun part is when we start to add details in and towards the end so I try not to worry too much about how things look at this stage because it might not look perfect but once you build up with these details it's going to transform it so I actually hand draw out my birds in advance I draw them onto a sheet of paper and really perfect it because as I mentioned about the silk it's kind of like a luxurious thing you might not want to just go diving in and ruining it although you can just erase it's just you know you're not going to be able to fully fully erase things so yeah I plan everything out in advance on a sheet of paper and then I transfer it onto silk and I do that using the tracing paper method basically like pushing the graphite through onto the silk so it's all like exactly how I want it so for this bird I've just done the outline and just a few of the feather details but the rest of it I'm just gonna free hand in so the white paint that I use it's Winsor and Newton permanent white gouache paint it's really just amazing in so many ways but it's also got its faults so the white is really really blendable so it's perfect to add to other colors as well if you want the other colors to be really blendable and you can add it to other colors without you don't have to fully change the color into like a chalky whitey tone of it you can still do it just adding like a small amount it will just extend the life of the paint because one of the hardest things uh working with watercolors or possibly dries out you know so the white you can kind of leave it on there for ages and then move it move it around but then the problem with that benefit is that once it's dry if you wanted to shade on top of a white then it's gonna lift that paint up so it's kind of like yeah it's got but when I when I want to shade on top of white I sometimes use acrylic gouache so it's like it's got that really nice opacity and the the matte velvety look of gouache but it won't move because it's got the properties of acrylic paint so sometimes I lay down water first as I've done here with the shading and that is another way to extend the life of the paint on the paper so I've laid down the plain water and then I've gone on with my violet shade and it just makes it a bit easier to blend but as you can see there it kind of it comes out a bit lighter so it's kind of lost that depth from going straight onto the paper but then you have to work quicker so these are the techniques that I battle with and I still battle with them it depends on the temperature in the room if you're somewhere hot in a hot country then you're almost certainly going to need to lay some water down before you paint if you want to get like a really really nice blend and I am all about the blending I just love a smooth gradient and here I think I'm struggling actually in this this video um not everything's perfect you know I I went over this bird quite a few times and when I start a painting I don't even know what it's going to look like by the end of it I just go with it and so here I'm just going and going I could do loads of layers and then kind of try and paint over them and I do remember struggling with this bird a little bit actually um so yeah I keep I think I've changed the color a bit I've gone from a violet to a sort of blue I might be working on this section for a while so now I'm going into the feathers and this is super super detailed work but it's one of my favorite parts actually so I've gone on following my pencil line with some of that violet and what I do is I do every other feather because if you go feather and then start on the feather next to it it's gonna bleed into it so do every other feather and then go back and fill in the middle feathers and it'll just make your life easier so so I'm just laying down the violet paint and again with my clean water brush just using the tip to just blend out and I kind of I start with it with a light touch and then kind of press down when I when I go out to the thinner fletch sorry for my video I'm learning along the way and this is all practice and preparation because I'm going to be launching courses because this style of painting is super super rare and I went to China to learn how to do it and I also learned on the job mainly before I worked at a handmade wallpaper company in London and they sent me out to China and I kind of really I learned from the masters and I increased my skills I guess with them and it's super super rare there's if you look online I mean I haven't been able to find other other artists teaching chinoiserie art and I haven't been able to find silk paper anywhere and generally it's kind of been known to be just for the luxury interior designers and that's how that's how chinoiserie started in the 18th century it was all it was all kind of like luxury gifts from it was made it was made in China but it was designed by Europeans and it was kind of depicting this exotic far east and and what we thought it would look like and you know it's amazing and it was brought back to the the absolute wealthiest in society as wall panels and that would be used to decorate like palaces and stately homes so if you've been to there is Bryant Pavilion there's quite a few houses on the National Trust list that have original chinoiserie wallpapers installed and yeah it was just always just known for being the height of luxury and it kind of remained that way for quite some time with the high-end companies like Degorne, Gracie, Fromental all hand painting this in very much the same way as it as it was in the 18th century and yeah I've come along and basically put it into print so it can be accessible for everyone so my my wallpapers are printed and available to buy on the roll and it's got that beautiful chinoiserie feeling but you can buy it really easily so I am I'm doing layers and layers of of of the violet going back every other one feather and back in so I'm just gonna let the video play for a bit and because I'm doing the same thing and I'll come back and talk to you about the rest so here I am just defining some of these tiny feathers that are going to be going up the whole back of the bird just using a mechanical pencil which is one of my favorites to use I also use a 4H pencil when I'm drawing straight onto silk so this is some of the very fine feathers and I'm just using that same process and this one this part's going to take a really long time actually so I'm just using the tip of my brush to just shade it out and this is going to create some ultra fine detail so so now that I've done all of my base layers of shading I'm gonna go in with my very very fine brush and add in tiny little white strokes just to give it that kind of feathery look this is the part that is going to absolutely transform this painting so I'm using another natural animal hair brush and it's a very long tip it's about two centimeters and a white gouache but I've mixed in a little bit of green to give it a kind of limey look and I'm just using just little flicks of that brush and because it's it's such a long tip it can retain that liquid for so long so I can just go for quite some time without reloading so So I've started with a dark eye base, I've used a black and then I've added white gouache highlight and I'm just shading it out. I'm just using my ultrafine detail brush to just define that eye. Adding some shading into the beak using some, I've got a grey tone base and I'm adding in some black which I'm just going to blend out with that water So this is one of my favourite parts, this is adding in tiny little hairs or little feathers and it can take quite some time depending on the size of the bird and I'm just going with it. I'm On top of the green base I'll use a slightly lighter green so that you can just just about see it but it's just not too contrasting and when I go over the yellow I'll use a yellow like a slightly darker or slightly lighter tone so I will decide in the moment whether I'm going to go darker or lighter. So this whole bird could have been painted with really dark details so where you can see all the white flicks they could have all been a black and it would have had a very different look but sometimes I just love it when my birds just glisten like magical creatures and this artwork that I'm painting was actually inspired by The Magic Faraway Tree which was my favourite book as a child so it makes sense. so So this is the point that I started really struggling with this bird because I was looking at it and thinking I've gone way too way too strong with the contrast on that head area head and neck which contradicts everything that I just said and I I remember going over this again so I think that's what's about to happen so here I'm just defining the eyes with just tiny weenie little dots of white gouache and for that you need to just take off the majority of the paint just dab it off on a cloth and and get rid of most of it otherwise you risk a blob just ruining your whole painting and here's the magic this is my favorite part look it just gets brought to life I mean it's crazy just one little white dot in the eye of a bird or in the eye of anything just just gives it that light so this is this is me panicking just trying to add and add sometimes this is what happens you start trying to add and add and sometimes it just doesn't quite work out let's have a look so this is me realizing that I went completely wrong and I'm just smoothing out all of those contrasty that it just looks better now it looks it looks smoother and this is what art's all about it's about experimenting so yeah I think this looks better than the harsh harsh lines and what's me adding in some tiny little details to the belly feathers that was my original tracing just matching it up and just adding in those feet which for me is just one of the hardest parts of the bird I don't know why I find it so hard to do the feet and they're kind of weird aren't they birds feet they're kind of gnarly and so I think that is about complete just a few little details little outline little outline on the birds foot and this is part of a much bigger panel which you can go and check out on my website is called faraway tree and there are loads of different pigeons in there of different species and the two main ones of Victoria crown pigeons and this one is a classic London pigeon made beautiful thank you so much for watching my video I hope you enjoyed it there will be more coming and they will only get better and better so this is just a start just a little taster and I really do welcome your feedback if you want to give me any feedback and please sign up to my artists mailing list where I will be sending tips on how to paint and also build a business from your paintings this is the very start of this journey and I can't wait to share more with you it's very exciting to pass on these skills I've learned you can purchase the silk paper on my website and also wait for my courses which are coming in future so just stick along with me and also follow me on Instagram of course at Diane Hill design