How the Heck Do I Paint This Book?
Visiting a paper factory, chasing clouds and testing out every material
Hi Cool Kids.
Why hasn’t there been a post in the past month?
Well…
I was too busy pulling my hair out!
To be honest, I’ve been pulling my hair out for actually a couple months now.
I’ve been spending all my time making my life more difficult than it needs to be (as usual). At this point I think we should call this newsletter Am I a Masochist? instead of Am I Doing This Right.
Anyways, what I’ve been so busy doing is attempting to figure out how I’m going to paint the final artwork for my next book which I’ve been referring to as the “Bear” book.
I first pitched this book in 2022 and here are some test artworks I made at the time:
This art was made with color pencils and oil pastels. I still didn’t have a clear idea of how this story would evolve and this was what I liked at the time.
But alas, 2022 was two whole years ago and now I am older and not necessarily wiser.
Part 1: Taiwan
Earlier in January when I began to work on on the sketches for this book, I also began to experiment with how I wanted to paint this book. I was in Taiwan at the time and was surrounded by many traditional Chinese paintings. There even happened to be an exhibit of a prolific Taiwanese painter happening at my local art museum:
While in Taiwan, we took a family trip to Wujie (武界) & Puli (埔里).
On our second day there, we woke up extra early before the sunrise to hop into a very durable but well worn van where our tour guide drove us up a treacherous mountain.
The point of waking up early was to attempt to catch a glimpse of the 雲海 or “sea of clouds.” Luckily it had been rainy and gloomy the entire day beforehand because we managed to catch the most beautiful sea of clouds at the top of the mountain.
I tried to do some painting but it was dark and we only spent a couple minutes at each location. Our guide knew his way around the mountain like the back of his hand and as we clung on for dear life in the rickety van, he maneuvered us through the trees and roots to find his prime spots for cloud viewing.
After driving around for a while, we finally reached a beautiful peak of the mountain right as the sun began to rise.
It was BEAUTIFUL! We ended up finding the best view among the tea fields.
Afterwards, we warmed up by visiting the small tea processing house down the mountain.
We got to taste test all the different levels of roasted tea. It was awesome.
Anyways, the reason I’m sharing about this trip is because we also visited a paper factory where I got to see first hand how paper for these traditional paintings are made.
We got to do a cool tour of the factory where they showed us the whole process. Below are the steps the wood goes through to become paper:
Puli is a small township in central Taiwan and according to this info board, they are famous for the 4Ws:
According to my parents this is apparently very true and they say all the beautiful babes are from Puli… Too bad I’m not from there. Damn.
Anyways, we got to see how the wood is blended:
During this stage, different things can be mixed in with the paper to create different colors or effects such as:
Taiwan Gorgeous Mulberry paper or at the other end of the spectrum: Cow Dung paper!
The pulp is then strained and laid into blocks made up of layers and layers of paper:
Once the layers are semi dry, they are separated and then laid on a massive heated flattop where the master dries the paper:
Then all that paper is packaged and sold!!
Y’all know of course I looked at all of this and said “YEA! I’m gonna channel that energy into this book!!!” I bought a cute little notebook at the store that featured all these different kinds of paper:
Which leads us to…
Part 2: I can totally do this!
I told myself that this paper would be perfect, I would paint this entire book with this beautiful paper and brush strokes inspired by my homeland. An homage to my heritage.
So I tried a test page:
And unfortunately…
It did not perform the way I wanted it to AT ALL! UGH.
Turning to other points of inspiration, it was also around this time that I discovered an amazing book at the bookstore that I became obsessed with. It’s called ANGRY. Here’s the cover: