sumi-e wash painting

I decided to research far eastern painting styles, I looked a little at woodblock printing and illustration. Although all of it is beautifully done I know this isn't a style i wanted to work with for my playing cards, since the illustrations will be quite small, on constricted space. the detail would get lost. The vector illustrations I have already created, although I feel they are strong and would work really well on the small space provided. It loses the japanese feel to the cards completely. It makes the playing cards look too westernised and I would like to try and get a combination between the two. During my research I came across sumi-e wash painting. Quite simple but really nice paintings. This is more the style that I can work with to get a successful outcome of the playing cards. I will have to digitize it though, for the print production, since these cards will be printed on a big print run, therefore i can't do screen printing or anything.

Sumi-e is a style of painting that is characteristically Asian, and has been practiced for well over a thousand years. Literally ink painting, it is an art form that strives to distill the essence of an object or scene in the fewest possible strokes. A few carefully placed broad strokes that fade off abruptly, a few thin lines and a dot, and a bird is clearly called into being on the paper.

Sumi-e is sometimes confused with calligraphy, because the tools used are the same. Calligraphy is the graceful, artistic representation of written characters, using ink and brush, while sumi-e is painting a scene or object. In the West, sumi-e is often called Chinese Brush Painting, although it has been a major art form in Japan and Korea as well.

this shows how sumi-e ink painting has inspired a digital drawing. Although I would like to create my images in fewer strokes than this, I will use ink and calligraphy tools to create my images so they get a similar ink effect. I think this style could work really well with the final card outcomes, sticking to simple imagery inspired by far eastern painting methods. Since I have to focus on the tiger beer colours, I won't use the 'wash' style of drawing but create the washes on illustrater and fill the imagery in with the blue and orange tiger beer colours.

I like the stroke marks used in this piece, although i need to kep quite a bit of white space in my illustrations to get the colour of the tiger beer to peer through, I would like to include some pen marks to create texture of the fur or feathers of what I am illustrating.