Tuesday 28 March 2017

Cockatoo WU



Copyright Julie Vaux 2017


Would you like to see some of my techozi may available as a pdf ebook on Patreon or elsewhere?

Please let me know?

Saturday 25 March 2017

Swallow Design

Here's a #swallow design based on the #hanzi #kanji for YAN for you to use!


Its a PNG format file with a transperent Bg so you can edit it further or resize it or whatever.

This design will also be offered as an reward on my PATREON site 

One of this months Low Tier  Pledge rewards will also be a Technozi on a Phoenix theme.



Saturday 18 March 2017

Swallow Hanzi Sampler

#hanzi #kanji #swallow #font #sampler

A sampler of how the character for Swallow looks in various font faces and weights.




Wednesday 15 March 2017

Hokkei and Swallows

For our next bird the #Swallow

Here's a lovely #Surimono by #Hokkei a student of Hokusai.


Hokkei's drawingis perhaps more "delicate" than his masters possibly due to rimpa influence or studying Hiroshige as well as Hokusai. I like the way the color range has been reduced to bring out the details of the wing feathers!



Saturday 11 March 2017

Zheng Jie A Demanding Eagle!

#zhengjie #eagle #yangzhoueccentric #chinesepainting


Zheng Jie is better known for using bamboos and epidendrums as a theme.

Where he could have seen eagles living in Yangzhou I don't know? It's a lively energetic work.

He worked as a magistrate in Shandong province. Perhaps there?

Retiring to Yangzhou in his later years and being pestered by fans for paintings in exchange for "gifts" he is said to have put this notice on on his front gate along with a list of prices for each scroll size!

"Gifts and foods are not as good as cash, since what you give me might not necessarily be what I like. If you present cold, hard cash, then my heart swells with joy and everything I paint or write is excellent." 

Zheng Jie is regarded as being one of the Yangzhou Eccentrics group.

Some people were "gifting" artists with "tokens of appreciation" by providing rent free housing or rolls of silk or bags of rice or swapping collectibles. One was supposedly to refer to these as gifts.

Being totally honest about how a retired magistrate who painted made money from his art was apparently "eccentric" in 18th China?! 





Wednesday 8 March 2017

Zhao's Hoopoe

#zhaomengfu #chaomengfu #hoopoe #chinesepainting

While searching for images of hoopoes for a different blog I cam across this.

Zhao Mengfu is usually mentioned as a LANDSCAPE painter in texts on Chinese paintings but he also painted bird and flower themes but frankly I like this one better than the landscape usually shown OVER AND OVER again in most books! Also the various collectors and previous owners had the good taste to apply their personal seals in the blank spaces at the edges!



Also bear in mind some old European oil paintings the colors have changed over the colors. I suspect the greens were once much stronger. There's still a lot of exquisite detail despite this being a lower resolution web file and image much smaller than original scroll! Enjoy!


Saturday 4 March 2017

Eagles !!!

#eagle #hanzi #kanji #chinese #japanese

Copyright Julie Vaux 2017 
Japanese uses a kanji that means vulture in Chinese to mean eagle and uses this kanji for HAWK!

During the recent "upgrade" of a certain online lexicon someone snafu'd the Hakka entries so I have no idea what the tone is for the Hakka entry!

The chinese word ying and its hanzi appears in a variety of compound words to describe various avian raptor species including falcons and hawks as well as eagles.

You may also see the Cantonese jing spelt as ying in some romanisations.

There are also other words for eagle but this appears to be the main term.

Look up diao and shuang.

The next post in this birds series will be a painting!

Some time in the near future due to a discussion with a Twitter acquaintance I may post on Sinitic influence on Vietnam and why Viets and other Asians get sick of being mistaken for Chinese and vice versa.