Spring Flower Fall Card

This image was created using sumi (ink) and watercolor painted on Shuen Paper (Xuan Paper). What is Shuen Paper you might ask? It is Chinese rice paper. Rice paper is the brush painter's canvas. Mastering the way ink behaves on the different rice papers is one of the essential skills of the brush painter. There are basically two kinds of rice paper -- raw paper and sized paper. Shuen Paper (Xuan Paper) is raw paper and the most popular paper in China among brush painters and calligraphers. It is the most sensitive of the rice papers, cheerfully displaying dynamic strokes and complex shade variations with translucent fluidity and original spontaneity. These tiny pink flowers grow abundantly on the hillsides in Carmel in the Spring and cascade in the wind like pink waterfalls.