Chinese Mural Painting Methods

Paintings made on natural or artificial walls by drawing, sculpture or other modeling means. As an accessory part of a building, its decorative and beautifying function makes it an important aspect of environmental art. Mural painting is one of the earliest forms of painting in human history. Most of the existing prehistoric paintings are cave and cliff murals, the earliest of which are about 20,000 years old. Fragments of mural paintings from the Qin Palace in Xianyang, Shaanxi, China, are 2,300 years old. Han Dynasty and the Wei Jin and North and South Dynasties period mural painting is also very prosperous, since the 20th century a lot of unearthed. The Tang Dynasty formed a period of mural painting boom, such as Dunhuang mural paintings, Kizil Grottoes, etc., for the peak of the mural art at that time. After the Song Dynasty, frescoes gradually declined, and after 1949, frescoes were restored and developed, and in 1979, the frescoes of Beijing Capital Airport were completed. After that, frescoes were added to some new buildings, and many of the works were innovative and developed in terms of artistic expression, production techniques, as well as inheritance of traditions and borrowing from foreign experience. Frescoes are divided into two categories of painting and craftsmanship. Painting type refers to the means of painting, especially hand-painted directly on the wall.

Specific painting methods are: ① dry fresco, in the coarse mud, fine mud, lime slurry treatment on the dry wall painting; ② wet fresco, the base is half-dry, to clear lime water and pigment painting, must be completed at once, difficult; ③ tempera paintings, egg yolk or egg white as the main mixing agent for the water-soluble pigments, painting in the dry wall, opaque, easy to dry, there is a sense of hardness; ④ wax paintings, wax and pigment mixing painting on wood or stone, then heat treatment Wax painting, wax and pigment mixed on wood or stone, and then heated; ⑤ oil painting, painted on linen or wood; ⑥ acrylic painting, with acrylic as the main mixing agent, fast-drying, non-glossy, commonly used in modern frescoes. The above painting methods are sometimes mixed, or combined with craft production and relief sculpture. Painting craft type refers to the craft production means to complete the final effect of the mural. Due to the production of handmade crafts or modern crafts, coupled with a variety of materials, texture, texture performance, can achieve other means of painting can not be achieved by the special artistic effect, it is widely used by the modern frescoes, divided into: ① wall carvings, between carvings and frescoes, tends to planarization of the composition, not to the volume of modeling is given priority to, so it is still close to the frescoes, there are shallow relief, deep relief and yin carving line and other techniques, the material has stone, cement, ceramics, wood carvings, bronze, etc.;. (ii) wall carving, cement mixed with chalk, lime, quartz sand, and then mix into the pigment, make the wall, not dry, peeled out of the different color layers, made of murals; (iii) mosaic murals, mainly cement mixed into the binder, with color stone, ceramic pieces, color glass, shells, enamel, gemstones and other particles inlaid; (iv) ceramic murals, easy to produce, sturdy, durable, with a good visual effect, as modern Ceramic mural is easy to produce, sturdy and durable, with good visual effect, for the modern fresco widely used means. In addition, a variety of processes can be used to produce murals, such as grinding paint, lacquer painting, carpet weaving, printing and dyeing, artificial resins, synthetic fibers and so on. Modern fresco involves more categories, has become a painting, sculpture, crafts, architecture and modern industrial technology and other disciplines between a fringe art.