The following brackets refer to Baidu Encyclopedia:
The Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty were the period of in-depth development of China's figure painting. With the establishment of the Palace Painting Academy, meticulous figure painting has become more exquisite. With the rise of literati painting, folk manuscripts have been improved into a painting style, which is called line drawing by Li. With the development of urban and rural economy in Song Dynasty, the dispute between Song Dynasty and Jin Dynasty, realistic social genre paintings and historical story paintings also flourished. Zhang Zeduan's masterpiece The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival came into being in this period. Influenced by Zen in the Southern Song Dynasty, Kai Liang's splash-ink stick figure painting marked the rise of freehand figure painting, and China's figure painting began to develop in another direction. Ladies' paintings and Gao Shi's paintings appear in large numbers.
Basic techniques of figure painting: No matter at home or abroad, in the early painting history, figure painting was the main thing, all of which served religion or politics. From the constantly excavated ancient silk paintings or murals, we can see the faces of ancient emperors, heroes, sages or literati, which have strong political and religious functions, as well as Buddhist figures such as Buddhism, Bodhisattva and Lohan believed by the ancients, and even earlier myths and legends, which are full of mysterious religious colors. We can also see genre paintings that describe various real life, lady paintings that show the aesthetic taste of the court, character story paintings in operas, and characters with different forms and themes.
Throughout China's ancient figure paintings, the expressive techniques can be roughly divided into three categories. One is drawing. Meticulous painting and heavy color painting. The third is freehand brushwork (stick figure method).
See the entry of meticulous figure painting in Baidu Encyclopedia for details.
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