Primer on Eight Varieties of Painting (Hasshu gafu 八集画譜)
Primer on Eight Varieties of Painting (Hasshu gafu), a Chinese woodblock manual of flower and bird painting printed in 1672 for students and amateur painters learning brush techniques. Each double page pairs a black-line picture of flowers, branches, or perching birds with a column of calligraphic text naming the plant and describing its habit and colour. The pictures are spare, precise contour drawings with little shading, useful to a designer for botanical line structure, leaf clusters, and the economy of simple ink outline.
