Ink painting is kind of unforgiving to the amateur. You pick up the brush, stick it on paper, and the result is a lump of stuff – dense and formless and no relation to the graceful mountain you envisioned. A mere dark defeated mass staring at you. It is the moment that makes a structured course worth everything and not any other. More info!
It is something like trying to learn to swim by reading about water to go it alone with ink painting. You may come to your stroke, though you will gulp a good deal in the mean time.
A good course takes the beginners just to that stage of bewilderment, that of being paralysied before a blank white piece of paper and not being quite sure where to start. Effective teachers reduce brush control to its essentials, the degree of pressure to use, the speed at which to move the tip across the surface, the time to allow the ink to freely spread and the time to suppress it. Left to themselves, these are lessons which it takes years to fall over. They protract weeks in the right course.
This is where majority of individuals are taken unawares, ink painting is so physical. The quality of all lines is changed by posture. Each mark is influenced by the breathing. That is why they have experienced professionals who hold studio sessions more like meditation. A good course will tell you this early enough, and save you months of guessing at the reason of your lines trembling like something scared.
The discussion on the materials is enough to enroll. Not all inks flow the same way. Papers do not absorb and forgive at the same rate. A single student managed to burn a whole pack of the dear rice paper because nobody had told her that it burns three times as fast as normal practice sheets. A course averts such suffering of heart even before it occurs.
Topics are opened with true savanour into bamboo stalks in front of complete landscapes, one petal in front of lengthy compositions. Not nurturing it, but good sequencing. It is costly misery trying to imitate a tiger before you know anything about the variation of strokes.
The most astonishing thing that students find in the process is the rate at which things stick together once the fundamentals are established. The brush stops fighting. The ink stops betraying. Negative space – the open and silent spaces of the piece – becomes intentional and not accidental. To pass that dividing line is something really momentous.
Feedback cannot be substituted by a video tutorial. Someone reprimanding you because your bamboo joints are too straight and just how to loosen up the spaces, is worth a dozen hours unto yourself.
Community aspect catches on people as well. Mutual adversity, mutual hilarity at mutual catastrophes, exchanged glances, the common force will produce that momentum which individual energy alone often proves incapable of maintaining.