New Year Pictures Enhancing the Festive Atmosphere

Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year) is the most important traditional festival in China. People celebrate it with lanterns and streamers, no matter where they live, in the countryside or in the city. New Year pictures are an indispensable part of this celebration for each and every household. People put up New Year pictures in their homes to enhance the lively festive atmosphere.
Most New Year pictures feature designs symbolizing good fortune, auspiciousness and festivity. A popular New Year picture entitled Surplus in Successive Years depicts a cute plump baby holding a big carp in his arms and a bouquet of lotus flowers in his hand."Fish" and "surplus" in Chinese have the same pronunciation (Yu). Through the homophony of the two words, people express their wishes for affluent lives. China is a country of vast territory, so the styles of New Year pictures vary from north to south. The northern New Year pictures are best represented by those produced in Yangliuqing in Tianjin Municipality, while in the south there are those from Taohuawu in Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province.
Yalwliuqing New Year picture Mother and Sons Playing Yangliuqing is a small town located in the southwestern outskirts of Tianjin. About 300 years ago, its New Year pictures began to enj oy great fame, with every family adept at creating this particular genre of painting. Yangliuqing New Year pictures adopt the method of xylograph overprinting combined with hand-painted color, hence establishing its distinctive feature of "half printing, half painting."The process goes like this:
1) carve designs out of wood;
2) print the pictures ;
3) color the pictures
4) mount the pictures.
All pictures are handmade paintings rather than mass-produced products, and all evoke traces of the woodcut and the feel of brushwork. With exquisite craftsmanship, Yangliuqing New Year pictures are very popular with Chinese people. The lively festive atmosphere is best reflected in the Yangliuqing New Year pictures. Fresh and effervescent, each picture reproduces an interesting scene from everyday life. For example, Mother and Son depicts a lakeside courtyard, inside which are rock formations and flowers. The mother stands at a window, fan in hand, calling out to her son frocking outside. The plump son in a bellyband holds a wooden stick with a bird perching on it. The whole picture brims with an affectionate, loving atmosphere of family life.
Taohuawu New Year pictures, produced using traditional techniques of watercolor block printing, are characteristic of the delicate and gentle style in areas south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Thematically, the pictures draw much from the paintings of literati as well as folk stories, while artistically, most are scholarly and refined, unlike the heavy and resplendent style of the Yangliuqing pictures. Taohuawu New Year pictures once spread to Japan and exerted a certain influence on Japanese ukiyoe paintings, or paintings from the "floating world". About 300 years ago, Taohuawu New Year pictures began learning from the style of Western bronze carvings, as well as the use of shadow. Celebrated for its pure and attractive images of women, Taohuawu New Year pictures enjoy great popularity among the Chinese people.