According to painting techniques, Chinese painting can be divided into two styles: xieyi style and gongbi style.

 Xieyi, or freehand, is marked by exaggerated forms and freehand brushwork. Freehand brush work is more random, because it does not pay too much attention on the similarity. This character makes it a genre that is both easiest and most difficult. There is little sense of space consciousness which the western has in Chinese traditional painting. It is organized by different use of ink. With the power of the brush reinforced, the shades get deeper and darker. The relation between two objects is also depicted in an abstract way. So you may see a scene that in which two people has different size of body. Sometimes it might be exaggeration and sometimes it is related to the connotation under the scene.

 Gongbi, or meticulous, is characterized by close attention to detail and fine brushwork.Gongbi is a careful realist technique in Chinese painting, which uses highly detailed brush strokes that delimit details with extreme precision. The gongbi style had its beginnings approximately 2,000 years ago during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.)