The Dawn of Spring

This is the roughly translated title of this piece.

Title Information
Character	Pinyin	Meaning
	chūn	Spring (Season)
	xiǎo	Dawn

Here we see cranes as they frolic in the shadow of a pine forest. As the title suggests, Spring is right around the corner. In fact, the title suggests that this might be the first day of Spring. But it is still a bit on the cool side, since according to the Chinese lunar calendar, Spring usually starts in February.

Chen Wei-Ling puts the finishing touch signature
on the beautiful Asian Artwork that
she and her husband created for me.

This hand-painted artwork is from the

Xiao Meng Asian Art Collection

The artists of this collection are actually a married couple who travel around China together looking for subjects to paint. Their real names are Chen Yong Ping and Chen Wei Ling but they sign all of their work under the single pen name Xiao Meng.

They work as a team on most of these paintings. One of them does the background and the other will handle the detail work on each painting.

The artists take great pride in the fact that they have developed their own unique painting style which they call "hazy painting" (this is roughly translated - it sounds better in Chinese).

They use a combination of "freehand style" and "elaborate style" in their paintings. The background is done using broad fast strokes and spray with very thin paint. The foreground (cranes) are done with a lot of detail using a delicate technique with a very fine brush.