Learn · the first stroke is free
Зернятко is the first thing a student in Petrykivka is given, and it asks for a brush, a saucer of paint and a sheet of paper. The lesson below is the real one, written from the teaching texts used in Ukraine. Work it at a kitchen table today; everything else in the vocabulary opens out of it.
Free lesson · зернятко
Zerniatko, the little grain. One pull of the brush that begins as a hairline and ends at full width — and a row of them set along a stem becomes an ear of grain, which is where the name comes from.
What you need
The same teaching text that records masters working with no drawn outline allows a beginner a few light guide lines. Use them for the stem, and place the grains by eye.
Load the brush and touch the tip to the paper so lightly that it leaves a hair. Then pull — and as you pull, let the brush down onto the sheet, so the mark widens under increasing pressure until the body of the hairs is lying flat. Lift straight off at the end. The whole thing lasts under a second.
Ukrainian teaching texts give it in one line: «почавши з легкого дотику, до сильного натиску пензлем» — begin with a light touch, end with a strong press. Make twenty in a row without stopping to judge them. Then turn the sheet and make twenty more running the other way, so the hand learns the curve in both directions.
A usable зернятко has a tip you have to hunt for: the paper takes the hair and the mark only becomes visible a millimetre in. It swells evenly, with no step where the pressure jumped. It finishes full, the widest point at the very end rather than somewhere in the middle.
Hold the sheet at arm’s length. A row of good ones reads as grain on a stalk. A row of failed ones reads as scattered commas.
Diagnostics
Pressing first and dragging away makes a real stroke, and it is a different one: that is гребінець, the comb. Both live in the vocabulary, so the error stays invisible until you rank your grains along a stem and the ear of grain points the wrong way.
Check the first millimetre of the mark. Зернятко begins as a hair.
Petrykivka is laid straight onto the surface with nothing sketched underneath, which means a mark is placed once. A second pass over paint that has started to set flattens the taper and leaves a seam across the middle.
Let a poor grain stand, and put the next one down beside it.
The tradition’s own defence against a mechanical look is the changing angle: in a бігунець the flowers sit at equal intervals and the tilt shifts every time. Grains ranked at one unvarying angle read as printing, and that is the easiest way to tell a painted band from a repeated vector one.
What to do next
Fill one sheet with зернятко. Then run the same curve backwards — press first, drag away into a whisker — and that is гребінець. Then lay the grain on an arc for кривеньке зернятко. Three marks, and three of the four that carry the whole tradition are in your hand.
The fourth is перехідний мазок: one dry brush carrying two paints, colour in the body and colour on the tip, laying a gradient inside a single mark. It is the move the school is known by, and it is the one worth learning from a person in the room with you.
Tools
Two of these a painter makes by hand, and the third is the hand itself. Industry never took up the кошачка, so every master still builds her own.
Soft cat fur bound with ordinary thread onto a straight twig, made by the painter herself. Masters have worked through the alternatives — wolf, hare, squirrel bristle — and settled on the cat. Halyna Nazarenko’s verdict to Ukraïner: «все не те. А от кішечка — те що треба». The fur is exceptionally elastic, and one brush draws both an ordinary line and the finest tracery.
It is combed out with a fine comb, which is where the question every Western reader asks gets its answer. Nataliia Rybak describes the work as serious diplomatic negotiations with the cat, conducted so that she agrees and refrains from scratching. The older the brush, the more worked-in it is, and the more it is prized.
Ukraïner, from the masters in Petrykivka ↗A stick cut from a tree shoot or from a marsh stem — рогіз, the bulrush, and оситняг, the rush — sharpened to draw hairline work. The Chaplynka river at Petrykivka still runs thick with bulrush; the reed-weaving craft that used it has no masters left.
Wikipedia UA, on the toolkit ↗Berries are set with a fingertip, and the mark has a signature anyone can read: a round dot, lighter and raised at the centre, ringed by a darker edge where the pigment was pushed outward. Fingerprints are part of the finished work.
The tradition already carries its own substitutes for the hand — a квачик, cotton wound onto the end of a stick, and a dropper.
Велика українська енциклопедія ↗Squirrel-hair (біляча) and synthetic brushes belong to the normal modern kit, and the state encyclopedia lists factory brushes among the tools. The teaching texts say plainly that an ordinary watercolour brush with a thin sharp tip serves for зернятко, кривеньке зернятко and fine branches — which covers everything in the lesson above.
One job resists substitution. The кошачка has no commercial equivalent for петушиння, the fine tracery that gives a composition its transparency, and nobody manufactures cat-fur brushes at all. Masters can tell by eye which brush painted a sheet, and the encyclopedia captions its own gallery accordingly.
Велика українська енциклопедія ↗Oksana Pikush makes her own brushes and carries them over from Petrykivka, and everybody in one of her classes is handed one.
The order it is taught in
Two teaching sources in Ukraine — the Dnipropetrovsk regional library's «Основи петриківського розпису» and the lesson plans used in schools — agree on the shape of this and differ on the wording. Read it as how Petrykivka is generally taught, rather than as one official curriculum.
Whole compositions come after the list — гілочка, букет, вазон, килимок. By then the marks are happening without being thought about, which is the reason the first weeks are spent on a palette.
Classes
Oksana Pikush was born and raised in Petrykivka and learned the craft at home — from her parents, Andrii and Maria Pikush, and from the master Ivan Dmytriuk. She teaches children and adults in Canada, and she paints interiors and murals.
Oksana teaches children as part of her regular practice, and every child in the room is handed a brush she made herself and carried over from Petrykivka. The order is the one listed above: the grain first, on a palette, until the pressure curve stops asking for attention.
Adults begin where a child begins, with the same stroke on the same palette. Across the diaspora an adult Petrykivka class has settled at two to three hours: the Ukrainian Museum of Canada charges CAD $35 for a two-hour workshop with materials included, and the Taras Shevchenko Museum in Toronto CAD $50 plus $10 for materials.
Comparable workshop pricing, Ukrainian Museum of Canada ↗For people with no Petrykivka teacher within driving range. One caution belongs on this page in a master’s own words: Valentyna Panko says a video can show the technique, and the technique is only part of what is being handed over. So the honest version of a remote class states what it carries and what waits for a room, before anyone pays for it.
Valentyna Panko on teaching by video ↗Oksana’s own specialisation is interior decoration and wall painting, and it runs apart from the teaching: a brief, a surface, a schedule and a price agreed in writing before a brush is picked up. Walls are where this art began: it went onto limewash inside the house and out, and was renewed several times a year before the great feasts.
Start a brief →Say who is learning, roughly where you are, and whether you want a room or a screen. The reply carries the current dates and prices. [BOOKING PAGE TO COME]
Next
Four strokes carry the tradition, and every element is assembled out of them. The glossary gives each one its Ukrainian name, its English gloss and the movement of the hand that makes it — with an honest note about where the names came from, and about the one name we left out.
The glossary of named strokes →