My Journey to Painting

Yesterday, while my young boy was sleeping in the afternoon, I brought my pen kit and fountain pen to the bedroom to draw a picture of "A Sleeping Boy." I was very pleased to see that my skills in drawing from life had been recovered and were even better than when I was a teenager.

I started painting at a very young age. Throughout my childhood, I had very few toys. Trapped in an apartment with cement walls when I had just moved from a rural to an urban area, drawing was one of the few activities that I could enjoy to spend my spare time. Later, my primary school offered some extracurricular activities, and I chose painting. From then on, every Saturday, I would go to an art room to study drawing and painting. There were quite a lot of students in the room, but most of them could not focus on the activities for the whole morning, whereas I was different. Especially when we came to the open air to sketch from life, many children just ran away to play games they liked. I didn't run away because painting was already my favorite activity.

Because of this, the teacher always paid more attention to me. I remember that I was the one who received most of his mentorship. While I was drawing either a tree or a flower, he would try to sit next to me, instructing me how to draw. Occasionally, he asked me to stop and demonstrated to me how to draw.

He said to us, "Watercolor will be a bit too challenging for you. I think you can use gouache because once you've made a mistake, you can just apply a new layer with the new color on top. You can't do this with watercolor, and this is why I don't recommend you start with watercolor." He taught us how to mix colors based on primary colors. Since most students studied casually, he spent more time teaching me, and in most cases, in a one-on-one manner.

During those years, I spent almost all my spare time painting. My academic performance was always very poor, but I did not care about it that much. In the back of my mind, I thought it might be a good excuse to learn fine arts in the future and launch a career as a painter.

Every birthday, I would receive presents about painting, such as a painting brush, a new set of pigments, and a book. There was once a book exhibition held in the city where I lived, and my sister bought a book about Chinese Landscape Painting Techniques. This became the best book I had ever read. I bought traditional ink, paper, and pigments to paint Chinese-style paintings too.

My academic performance improved a lot starting in Grade Six, the final year of primary school. Since then, I had gradually given up painting, though I still tried new styles and techniques occasionally. During my university years in Xi'an, I occasionally did pencil drawing sketches. Then, this hobby was fully abandoned once I came to Australia.

Since last year, I picked up my pen and brush again and resumed this hobby. I'm glad my capacity has basically recovered.