---
title: "Ink, paper and brush: a field guide to ink painting | Crucible Year"
url: https://peteryuill.art/guide
description: "A practitioner's guide to sumi ink, Xuan paper, brushes, feibai and the reading of abstract ink painting, written from a year of first-hand studio data."
source: generated from the Crucible Year master database
---

Field guide

# Ink, paper and brush.

A practitioner's guide to the materials and judgement of ink painting, written from a year of first-hand studio data: 402 large paintings, every paper and ink registered, every sheet measured. General facts are kept to what is well established; everything else is the archive's own evidence.

![T_292: a single broad stroke of ink sweeping across the sheet, black where it lands, streaked where it runs dry]

One stroke, four things to read in it · select a label · [T_292](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_292), 2026.05.07

[01 Xuan paper: what it is, how it is sized, and what fourteen papers did What Xuan paper is, raw, half-raw and cooked sizing, and first-hand data on fourteen Chinese papers used for a year of large ink painting.](https://peteryuill.art/guide/xuan-paper)[02 Sumi ink: soot, binder and the many blacks What sumi ink is made of, pine soot against oil soot, ink sticks against bottled ink, the five tones of ink, and ten blacks used in one year.](https://peteryuill.art/guide/sumi-ink)[03 Feibai, flying white: the dry-brush streak in ink painting What feibai (flying white) is, where the term comes from, how it forms, and how often it appeared across 260 paintings tagged blind.](https://peteryuill.art/guide/feibai)[04 Brushes for large-scale ink painting Goat, weasel and mixed-hair brushes, how loading and pressure shape a mark, and composite brushes up to about 70 cm wide.](https://peteryuill.art/guide/brushes)[05 How to read an abstract ink painting Five qualities to judge an abstract ink painting by, what each looks like from weak to masterful, and the flaws to look for, from 3,600 named flaws.](https://peteryuill.art/guide/reading-ink-painting)[06 Ink painting and Western abstraction: a short lineage From the Six Principles and Song splashed ink to Tobey, Kline, the Bokujinkai, Hong Kong's New Ink movement and Soulages: where East Asian ink and abstraction meet.](https://peteryuill.art/guide/ink-and-abstraction)