What is the white space technique in the art of calligraphy and painting? Is it the same thing as "line drawing"?

White, Suye, means using a single color - ink painting to depict objects, using lines to shape objects. This kind of line is not a simple outline, but full of hardness, softness, weight, urgency, and slowness. Lines that change in length, thickness, density, shade, etc. can express the image, volume, space, texture of the object and the mental outlook of the character, making the object vivid on the paper.

Line drawing is a special technique in Chinese painting. It refers to using only ink lines to outline the image on the paper without adding color. This technique is also often used for characterization in literary writing. What is line drawing?

For example, in the famous Chinese classical novel "The Scholars", Hu Tuhu, the father-in-law of the down-and-out scholar Fan Jin, originally looked down upon Fan Jin and often beat and scolded him. However, when Fan Jin came home from the imperial examination, he "The butcher saw that the back of his son-in-law's clothes was wrinkled a lot, so he lowered his head and pulled it for him dozens of times." This sentence alone, without any other description, expresses Butcher Hu's inner tendency to follow others very vividly. This writing method is called "white drawing". The relationship between line drawing and blank space!

Whether it is painting or literature, Qi Baishi's painting "Shrimp", judging from the effect of line drawing, will inevitably remind people of many hidden meanings, and the viewer needs to complete the picture by himself. Therefore, it can also be said that the technique of line drawing can often leave a lot of blank space for people to fully develop their imagination in addition to the outlined line image. This can be called "blank space". Of course, leaving blank space is not the same as white drawing.

For example, in order to highlight the key points in a painting, the painter will omit everything that is not necessary to draw. For example, when painting fish and shrimp, water is generally not drawn at the same time. This is because the artist wants to highlight only the agility of the fish and shrimp when they swim.

For another example, in calligraphy and painting, there is a saying of "think white and use black". Leaving a vast white space in the picture can exactly achieve a kind of sparse and tranquil beauty. Therefore, in terms of composition and organization, calligraphers and painters will consider how to plan the structural layout on the paper before they create, and think about where they do not need or should not write before they start writing, instead of clumsily filling in the entire picture. Full.