Painting and Carving a Chinese Temple
by Clayton Zhao
At school, my class, called basic art studios, was doing a piece of art that was related to the topic of cultural diversity. It is a project where people express their culture through their art-work. My teacher, Ms. Isabella, Grimann, had an idea of doing something other than just drawing. Along with our art piece, she asked us to make a carving on a linoleum plate, then put-ting it down on our artwork.
She first gave use a plate, in which we drew on. After that, she gave out carving tools so that we could carve around our lines so that we could create an art affect that when combined with ink and put on paper, would result in a final picture of our own idea. We did this, and we inked it and applied it to the rest of the art piece where it was a stamp-like image on the paper. Of course, we still applied regular coloring to our work and drew things around it.
My experience was to portray my Chinese culture, in which I drew a Chinese temple with a neat stone pathway that leads to a bridge crossing the river, then into a shrine, which was my print. I made a black ink image that showed a shrine with a dragon coiled around it. The background were mountains with a slow sunrise peeking in the distance.
Making the painting and the print out was for me a wonderful experience, and it helped me advance on my 4-Hs commitments, since this year, I had chosen Visual Arts as one of my 4-H projects. I learned a lot when work-ing on this project, and discovered different ways of doing artistic work.
