Page 76 - Tibetan Thangka Painting Methodsand Mat, Jackson

stencils by first tracing the print or line drawing onto
another sheet of paper.
To convert the original design or some copy of it
into a stencil (gtsag par) was easy. The artist simply
perforated each line of the design with a needle, creating
a series of pin pricks. Sometimes several stencils were
made at the same time by placing a number of thin
sheets beneath the paper bearing the drawing.
To align the stencil correctly in relation to the
vertical and horizontal axes of the canvas it was
necessary to mark the position of the vertical axis at the
top and bottom of the stencil itself. Then, to use the
stencil, the artist only needed to position it over the
painting surface and dust its surface with a porous bag
of powder.
As their pouncing dust the Tibetan artists often
used a mixture of charcoal and ochre (the same as they
used for the chalk line), or, according to one informant,
sometimes a mixture of charcoal and azurite dust. The
addition of an earth colour or mineral pigment to the
charcoal dust gave it more weight and stability. For
pouncing over dark surfaces the painters used a white
dust. Modern chemical pigments are by and large
unsuitable as pouncing dusts because many of them tend
to stain the painting surface. However, one of our Stencil of the Buddha. The diamond-shaped holes allow
for proper alignment along the vertical axis.
informants produced good pounces using a dust com-
posed of white pigment mixed with a very small amount
of commercial blue.
After a painter had dusted the whole surface of
the stencil with the powder bag, he gently removed the
stencil. Then he connected the dots of powder left
behind by brush and ink, and so established his design.
Not only did artists use the technique of pouncing
to transfer whole compositions, but they also applied it
widely to reproduce major (and sometimes even minor)
elements of a design. In an elaborate composition in
which several deities of the same class were to be drawn
in similar postures'and to the same scale, the artist could
use a single stencil to transfer the basic dimensions of all
the figures to the painting surface. When he was
redrawing the figures in ink, he would depart from the
stencilled image when necessary, for instance to depict
the exact mudra or hand gesture (phyag rgya) and
hand-held emblems (phyag mtshan) required by the
specific deity. Use of stencil by Wangdu.
We saw, for instance, a series of the lineal gurus of
the 'Brug-pa order being transferred to a thangka and
then drawn in this way. All of the figures were to the
same scale. Furthermore all had the typical 'Brug-pa hat
and their robes and feet were identical. The differences
lay only in their mudras and implements, so only these
features needed individual treatment in the later ink
drawing. Obviously, reproduction by stencil was also
ideally suited to paintings where a whole· field of
identical Buddhas or bodhisattvas was to be painted.
Another application of pouncing was in the
replication of landscape elements. The painters with
whom we worked (mainly artists from traditions
originating in Dbus) usually drew symmetrically
balanced landscapes. In the sky, for example, they Wangdrak transferring a design onto a drum.

72 ICONOMETRIC PRACTICE AND FURTHER TECHNIQUES OF SKETCHING