Dancheong: The Painted Colors of Korean Palaces and Temples

Look up at the eaves of a Korean palace or Buddhist temple and you will see beams and brackets covered in bright, precise patterns of green, red, blue, and white. This painted decoration is called dancheong. It is one of the most recognizable features of traditional Korean architecture, and it is the inspiration for daubday's Korean Pattern theme.

What dancheong is

Dancheong is the practice of painting patterns and colors onto the wooden parts of buildings, especially beams, rafters, brackets, and ceilings. The word is written with characters meaning red and blue-green, a shorthand for colorful painting in general.

Similar traditions of painted architecture exist elsewhere in East Asia, but Korean dancheong has its own palette, motifs, and conventions. It is carried out by specialist painters, and at temples the work has long been associated with monk painters. The craft is recognized in Korea as intangible cultural heritage.

Dancheong served several purposes at once:

• Protection. Layers of paint helped shield wood from rain, sun, and insects, and could cover knots and cracks in the timber.
• Decoration. Colorful patterns turned a structural frame into something festive and impressive.
• Status and meaning. Dancheong was used mainly on palaces, temples, shrines, and government buildings, not on ordinary homes. How elaborate it was signaled the importance of a building.

Not every building got the same treatment. Korean writing on the subject distinguishes several levels, from a plain base coat of color with no pattern, through simple outlined designs and paintings concentrated at the ends of beams, to the fullest style, where nearly every surface is covered in pattern. Temple halls are often painted in the most elaborate styles, while some palace buildings use more restrained ones.

Obangsaek, the five colors

Dancheong draws on obangsaek, the five traditional Korean colors. Each is linked to a direction and to one of the five elements of East Asian cosmology:

• Blue or blue-green for the east and wood
• Red for the south and fire
• Yellow for the center and earth
• White for the west and metal
• Black for the north and water

Obangsaek appears well beyond architecture, in clothing such as the rainbow-striped sleeves of children's hanbok, in food, and in ceremonial objects. In dancheong these colors, and shades mixed from them, are placed side by side in bands so that each edge stands out sharply, even from the ground far below. A soft green base is common on beams and columns, which is one reason dancheong buildings often read as green and red from a distance.

Common motifs

Dancheong uses a large vocabulary of patterns. A few appear again and again:

• Lotus flowers, closely associated with Buddhism, shown as round rosettes of layered petals.
• Geometric bands and repeating fabric-like patterns that run along beams.
• Other flowers and fruit, such as chrysanthemums and pomegranates, often worked into the designs at the ends of beams.
• Painted figures such as dragons, clouds, or Buddhist scenes on larger surfaces in some buildings.

The ends of a beam often carry the richest pattern, built up from rings of petals in graduated colors, with a calmer stretch in the middle.

How daubday's Korean Pattern theme is inspired by it

The Korean Pattern theme takes a few ideas from dancheong and turns them into color-by-number pictures. It is an inspired simplification, not a reproduction of real dancheong, which follows rules of placement and color that the pictures do not attempt to copy.

Each generated picture has:

• a grid of lotus-like rosettes, from 2 by 2 up to 4 by 4, each with petals arranged around a center,
• colors that alternate from one rosette to the next, like repeating units along a beam,
• and a border band decorated with dots that frames the whole design.

As with every theme, pictures come from a seed, so there are many variations at Easy, Medium, and Detailed levels.

Coloring tips

1. Color the border band first to set the frame.
2. Work one rosette at a time, from the center out, since the petals of a ring share numbers.
3. Then repeat across the grid. Rosettes alternate colors, so once you have done two neighbors you know the pattern.
4. Zoom in for the dots on the border, and use Hint to jump to the largest unfilled area of your selected color when a few remain.

If you enjoy rosettes, the mandala guide covers coloring rings of repeating petals in more depth. And for another Korean craft built from blocks of color, read about jogakbo. Next time you visit a palace or temple, it is worth looking up: the real dancheong overhead is far richer than any simplified picture can be.