Chinese Ink Wash — Style Prompt

Xieyi ink painting on rice paper, animated: blank paper is space, one brushstroke is a mountain, a wave, a gesture or a cut. References (grammar only): Shanghai Animation Film Studio's Feelings of Mountains and Water (1988) (blank-paper space, ink bloom, guqin pacing, figures in a few strokes); the bamboo-forest fight of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (weightlessness, stillness before action). Copy none of their characters, compositions or music.

1. Essence, and what it is not

An ink painting (水墨) painted and unrolled before you: black ink on warm rice paper in five tones, plus one red, the vermilion seal. No Western outlines: forms are made by loaded brushstrokes whose dark edge is the contour (沒骨, "boneless" painting), by wet washes that bleed into the paper, and by dry, fast strokes where the paper shows through the bristle tracks (飛白, "flying white").

Most of the frame is empty paper (留白): water, sky, mist, silence. Things are painted into existence, not cut to.

Not watercolour (no colour washes), not vector art with a brush texture (no flat fills or closed outlines), not a calligraphy title sequence.

2. Materials & rendering

• Paper is procedural, in the compositor, never a texture file: warm rice paper (around #F2ECDE), cloud mottling, long fibres, pulp flecks, grain that fades when zoomed out (or it shimmers), a light vignette; anchored to the world.
• Ink is stroke opacity multiplied onto paper (never an overlay), in five tones (墨分五色):

• Brushstroke model: centreline × pressure profile × width noise, plus 4–60 bristles whose ink load drops along the stroke and breaks on long-scale noise. dry runs from a solid wet stroke to flying white (dry strokes are bristle tracks only).
• Loaded stroke: bristles darker on one side, so the stroke carries its own contour: this makes bodies, rocks and waves read as ink, not vectors.
• Two layers: the wet one bleeds in the compositor (noisy blur, edge pigment accumulation, granulation); the dry one only gets fibre jitter and paper tooth.
• Masses: soft polygons, jittered edges, a gradient; never flat fills.
• Landscape: mountains dissolve downward into mist bands, with 披麻皴 texture and 苔點 moss dots on near ranges only; rocks are outline → axe-cut texture → shadow wash → dots.
• Water is blank paper, moved by faint dry streaks and open ink rings. Solid water: Song-dynasty parallel wave lines (dense near the edge) or a pale body with a few huge loaded strokes along its face.
• Figures are xieyi: one pale body mass plus two loaded strokes, burnt-ink lines for limbs; features, if ever shown, in 3–5 strokes.
• Calligraphy: an OFL brush font is only a skeleton: trace centrelines in stroke order, pressure from glyph thickness, hidden-tip entry (藏鋒), tapered exits.

3. Colour logic

• Ink only, from cool grey at low density to warm black at full density. No other hue in the world.
• One vermilion (around #B02E22), for the seal and at most one tiny accent in the story (an object the protagonist carries). The accent finds the protagonist in wide shots and can rhyme with the seal. Never a red wash, never red type.
• Values carry depth: far = pale and soft, near = dark and textured. If a frame gets busy, remove ink rather than add tone.

4. Type & subtitles

• Subtitles are inscriptions (題跋): a classical italic serif (Cormorant Garamond italic), ink-coloured, no box, ≤ 2 lines, placed in each shot's empty paper. A small vermilion square marks the start of each line. They appear wet and dry in a fraction of a second. Hold ≥ max(1.8 s, speech + 0.6 s).
• Titles are written on the painting itself, in vertical columns in its empty space, with a vermilion 白文 seal drawn by code (lines knocked out of a slightly irregular red square, with ink-paste speckles). They move with the world.
• Screen-space overlays reset the camera transform.

5. Motion quality

• Figures step at 12 fps (on twos); their position, the camera, blooms, ripples and splatter move on ones at 24 fps.
• Stable strokes on twos: seed every stroke by its index and compute bristle breaks along normalized arc length × a fixed reference length, so flying-white gaps don't crawl every drawing. Allow only a small "boil" on the width noise.
• Painted into existence: strokes appear in drawing order.
• Stillness before action (when a decisive stroke is the event): hold, with at most a slow push-in, then let the stroke cross the frame in a few frames. Consequences start only after the stroke has finished.
• Nothing is tweened like a vector shape: things are painted, bloom or dissolve into mist.

6. Camera grammar

A vocabulary, not a route. Opening and ending come from the topic.

Framing: 60–80 % empty paper; dark foreground may pass along the frame bottom. Transitions are ink blooms, pans along the scroll or mist; never a generic dissolve or a wipe.

7. Sound palette

• Guqin-led, not piano and strings: guqin (core/audio/pluck.py guqin: open and stopped strings, slides, vibrato, glassy harmonics, sweeps), a low breathy xiao, big drum and timpani for mass, frame drum for steps, a small gong for a seal. Chinese pentatonic modes.
• Cue to the picture, never loop: unmetred plucks suit emptiness, a pulse suits movement, rolls suit mass; painted strokes can each land on a pluck.
• Silence is literal: zero the whole bus (music, ambience, reverb tails) with short fades. At most one sound inside it (a drip, one ring). Place it where the story holds its breath.
• Foley follows the material: ink drop (short "tink" + soft wet thud), brush air (band-passed noise with bristle grains, never a metal whoosh), steps on water (small splash), splatter (wet ticks), seal (wooden thump + paper crackle).
• Voice: calm, few lines, like colophons that don't explain the picture. Duck music ~8 dB and ambience too; verify each line with whisper on the final mix.

8. Native moves

A menu: use the ones your story needs.

• One stroke is everything. Fits content like: a product born from one line; a city growing from a single street; a day beginning with one bird.
• Emptiness is matter. Removing ink reveals paper white. Fits content like: a door opening in a wall; a crowd parting; an absence in a family portrait.
• Brush = gesture = action. Stroke order becomes choreography. Fits content like: a dancer's phrase that spells a word; a signature; a chef's knife work.
• Flying white (飛白). One fast dry stroke across the frame, strongest out of a silence. Fits content like: a sprint finish; a decision; a comet.
• Ink bloom transition. The next scene grows inside a spreading drop with a dark tide-line (noisy radial mask; world-anchored for elements, in the compositor for scenes). Fits content like: memories; seasons; one era giving way to the next.
• The handscroll. One long painting panned right to left, seen whole at last. Fits content like: a history; a supply chain from field to hand; a day in a street.
• Splitting a mass. Halves clipped either side of the cut; one rises and fades, one slumps; splatter stays. Fits content like: breaking a record; a barrier falling; an idea splitting in two.

9. Pitfalls of the medium

• Dry brush looks like dashed lines → breaks from long-scale noise and an ink load that drops along the stroke.
• Parallel semi-transparent strokes make bodies look like organ pipes → one base mass + two loaded strokes.
• Big side-brush strokes look like a hairbrush → a gradient mass + a few low-dryness strokes. Gradients in vertical bands leave seams → a cached per-pixel layer.
• A stroke body split between wet and dry layers loses density → full body in the dry layer plus a wet halo.
• Clipping calligraphy with the font outline notches the junctions → font as skeleton only.
• Uniform hatching inside a wave turns it into a wire mesh → loaded strokes along the face.

10. Engine

In demo/: ink.js (brush engine: strokes, bristles, loaded strokes, masses, blots), comp.js (WebGL rice-paper compositor: bleed, edge pigment, paper, bloom), land.js (mountains, cun, cliffs, pine, reeds, ripples), wave.js (gestural wave), glyph.js (skeleton-traced calligraphy), seal.js (vermilion seal), hero.js (xieyi figure rig), subs.js (inscription subtitles), music/score.py (guqin writing with core/audio/pluck.py); ?test=sheet|pose|frame pages draw model sheets from the real engine.

11. Variation space

You decide the structure, the characters (or none), the landscape, the opening, the ending, the camera path, the pacing and where the red goes. All far from our demo:

• Structures: one character, stroke by stroke (no figure; each stroke of one large character opens into a vignette of the topic); a hanging scroll (a tilt from sky to ground through four stages, tone deepening); two brushes in dialogue (alternating strokes answer each other until they meet in one bloom).
• Openings: in motion (a figure already painted and moving; the world washes in around it); ink first (a fully inked frame; ink is lifted where light or a road appears); the bristles (a wet stroke fills the frame; only when it lifts do we see what it drew).
• Endings: one small mark (close on a footprint or a leaf while the ink around it dries; no pull-back); evaporation (the painting un-paints in reverse stroke order); mid-gesture (the brush stops before the last stroke lands).

How our demo was made (story, shots, score, end card, build): DEMO.md. Read it after your treatment exists.