Yangliuqing New Year pictures combine woodcarving, watermarking, and color painting, retain the techniques of folk paintings, and are influenced by the Qing painting workshops. Its subjects mainly include drama stories, beautiful women, and plump moppets, as well as josses, door gods, images of beauties, boy and girl attendants to a god or goddess, auspicious pictures, birds and beasts, flowers, water and mountain landscapes, and characters from dramas and legends. However, festivity and auspiciousness are always the main themes of Yangliuqing New Year Pictures.
Yangliuqing New Year pictures combine delineation, woodcarving, overprinting, color painting and mounting techniques, while featuring an exquisite touch, smooth lines, elaborate techniques, lifelike color paintings, and a vivid luster, especially the color paintings of human faces, which are fine, bright, and true to life.
Shandong Yangjiabu New Year pictures
Liaocheng's Yangjiabu presents New Year pictures in East China'sShandong Province. The artworks mainly feature Buddha and various other gods in an unconstrained manner. Yangjiabu New Year pictures reached a considerable scale in the Ming Dynasty. These pictures were also influenced by the Yangliuqing style, causing their subjects to later widen greatly, while at the same time maintaining their original flavor of being unsophisticated and vivid, forming their own unique style.
Shandong's New Year pictures as well have a rich content, with a lot works reflecting the rural life. The collocation of colors is usually exaggerated, bold, intense, and violent in contrast. The wild lines also add a special of farmer's painting to the art form.
Wuqiang New Year Picture
Prevailing mainly in North China, the Wuqiang New Year picture got its name because it was mainly produced in Hebei Province's Wuqiang County. The overprint wood block skills usually include three procedures of painting, carving, and printing. The subjects usually include opera stories, folkways, fashion, festival, marriage, moppet, beauties, flowers, and landscapes.