中国范儿166 在？教你做个敦煌彩塑

在？教你做个敦煌彩塑

Handy tips for making a Dunhuang-style colored sculpture

The colored sculptures in Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northwest China’s Gansu Province, have been recorded as far back as the Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 25). But how did Chinese craftsmen create such lifelike colored sculptures of life-like figures thousands of years ago?

答案是：穿越！

The answer might be a shared art philosophy transcending time and national borders. 

The making of Dunhuang colored sculptures seems to share similar ideas with modern art and western art, as it also pays more attention to the relationship between human bones and muscles, the proportion of figures and the coordination and authenticity of the body. The features are distinct when compared with other forms of sculpture in Chinese history and make it possible that ancient Chinese artists could create sculptures like “David” and “The Thinker” if asked to.

For small colored sculptures, the craftsman will cut the wood into the general structure of the characters, and then make a thin layer of fine mud to make a wooden model on which to make the character take shape gradually. Such a production process is rare outside Dunhuang.

Medium-sized colored sculptures require more wood to make the body structure. The tamarisk, with its branches and roots twisting and turning, and its tough branches, can be baked and bent at will. It is the most common wood used by ancient Dunhuang craftsmen to work out the colored sculpture body structure, spank naughty children and roast mutton as skewers.

They use appropriately curved tree branches or roots, slightly processed and assembled, to create a vivid character structure. Some slender branches are made into fingers, while some slightly curved branches are used as the trunk of characters.

After the body structure is built into shape, grass or reeds are used to further tie up the structure of the figure, giving the structure “muscle fibers”, and then layers of mud are added to shape the figure in a delicate manner. It not only effectively reduces the weight of the mud on the structure, but also more convenient for the craftsman to accurately manage the shape of the colored sculpture.

With wood as the bones and colored coating as skin, Dunhuang colored sculptures are particularly graceful and full of vitality. To this day, Dunhuang colored sculptures still maintain such traditional production techniques with simple materials but exquisite designs, making the art both mysterious and cordial, classical and modern.

来源：中国网

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