Traditional sculpture popular in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

The traditional sculpture art popular in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province is commonly known as grey sculpture.

Grey plastic sculpture, commonly known as "grey batch", is a traditional sculpture art popular in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, mainly distributed in Guangzhou urban area and Zengcheng and Conghua areas. According to records, gray sculptures appeared in the Tang Dynasty. Gray sculptures were widely used in the Song Dynasty. Zhenguo Temple in Zengcheng, built in the third year of Qingyuan in the Southern Song Dynasty (1 197), has a gray sculpture "Dragon Boat Ridge". During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, ancestral halls, temples and big houses were decorated with gray plastic.

Gray plastic has a unique process technology, with lime as the main material, which has the advantages of acid resistance, alkali resistance and temperature resistance, and is very suitable for the hot and humid climate conditions in Guangzhou. In addition, gray plastic does not need to be fired, and can be constructed on site, which has the flexibility and convenience of adapting to local conditions and different materials.

Basic steps of manufacturing gray plastic

1, refined gypsum

Raw lime is specially prepared and processed to make gypsum with certain strength, high plasticity and flexibility, which can meet various modeling needs. The quality of plastering is the key to the success of gray plastic. Gray plastic can be divided into "grass-reinforced ash" and "paper-reinforced ash", which are made by adding straw or grass paper to plastering and making them according to different weights and proportions.

Step 2 write a composition

Artists directly design patterns on buildings according to the needs of architectural space and decorative parts, and adopt different forms of expression, decorative techniques and composition contents according to different decorative parts and practical functions. Grey plastic decoration has no stylized mode, and it is all made by artists on the spot, which has great flexibility and randomness.

3. Bottom approval

According to the needs of modeling and the distance from the surface of the object to be represented, plane carving (flat carving, shallow relief), half carving (high relief), three-dimensional carving (round carving) and other techniques are adopted. If necessary, tie the skeleton with tile pipe or copper wire, and use hard "grass tendon ash" to form and compact. After a day or two, the first layer of "grass tendon ash" is wet, so fill in the second layer.

4. Modeling and coloring

Use a relatively delicate and silky "paper-reinforced ash" to shape the expression and other details of the object. Follow the principle of "first inside and then outside, first big and then small, first deep and then shallow" and color the finished shape. Part of the pigment is "color gray" made of "paper reinforced gray", which is the main color of gray plastic; The other part of the pigment is used alone, and can not be written until the gray plastic is 70% dry, so that the pigment can be firmly attached to the surface of the gray plastic through the process of lime hardening, which can be preserved for a long time.