WHAT THIS CATEGORY IS ABOUT
This category of our shop is uniquely dedicated to Chinese & Japanese ink, watercolor, paint, Oriental seal paste and all accessory and auxiliary products related to these main product categories.
In our largest sub-category you find different versions of Chinese ink sticks in different colors and quality levels. Together with the ink stone (or ink slab), the brush and Chinese paper they are referred to as the Four Treasures of the Study or Four Jewels of the Study and form the basic tool kit for Chinese brush painting, sumi-e and calligraphy. Since the ink stick is the most traditional and authentic ink tool used in Oriental brush painting and East Asian calligraphy, we selected many different types for our store.
Ink created by means of grinding a Chinese ink stick on an ink slab often is ink of the best quality for calligraphy and painting due to the ingredients used for create the stick such as pine sooth, charcoal and many other ingredients whose nature remains a secret of the few remaining traditional ink stick manufactories in China we buy from.
The most frequently used ink sticks produce dark or black ink but we also carry some ink sticks for more unusual colors such as red made with traditional cinnabar, ink stick sets in different bright colors and collectors' ink sticks which are beautifully painted with golden patterns of dragons, phoenixes and other mythological Chinese creatures bringing good fortune and luck to its owner, often also bearing the name of the ink stick manufactory written on it with golden color in one of the traditional calligraphy script styles.
Apart from the classic ink sticks, we also carry differrent types of Chinese liquid ink in good quality for every day sumi painting and calligraphy writing purposes. Here again, most Oriental liquid inks we carry are in black but we also have colored inks in red, gold and white color which create wonderful contrasts when working on colored art paper or when wanting to apply several layers and washes on existing layers created with black ink or for effects.
Finally, we carry the entire range of the well-known Marie's water color series in different sets from 12 to 24 tubes in different tube volumes / sizes.
Marie's colors are often called water colors by Western artist but in fact, Chinese watercolors cannot be compared with Western water color painting since these colors are compose of special color pigments unique to this type of color which ensure that the color is extremely long lasting, hardly faints and allowing for very unique effects when mixing colors, layering colors and mixing them with water. Whereas Western watercolors are often made of chemical products, traditional Chinese watercolors of which Maries colors is the best known and best quality brand often use nature materials and pigments such as cinnabar producing the unique shade of red on Chinese paintings.
To ensure we can offer you what you are looking for, we have Marie's colors in different tube sizes, in different sets but also in different packaging - there are the Economy sets and the premium sets which come in a more sturdy cardboar flip-lid box.
Maries Colors are not only used for Sumi painting but also for other Chinese art forms such as Gongbi Painting and Fineline painting or more rare painting schools such as the Lingnan style from the South of china.
To ensure you find everything related to Chinese and Japanese ink in this section, we also added Oriental water droppers, Chinese ink slabs and Japanese Ink Stones to this category which you also find in our accessory section. Should you be looking for any type of product you could not find here, please let us know and we are happy to add it to our portfolio for you.
