Christina Chang is a 12-year-old from Rockville, Md., who loves to color and draw and wants to go to art school.

Naichang Gong is a 72-year-old painter, born in China, whose work has been shown at museums.

So, what were these two serious artists doing finger-painting at the Gaithersburg, Md., library recently, their fingers and hands soaked with runny black ink?

Gong was showing Christina and about 40 other curious kids and adults the centuries-old Chinese technique of painting with the fingertips, hand and fingernails.

This way of making art is about as close to those multi-colored smears you did in preschool as the World Series is to T-ball.

“I found out I could express what I have in my mind more freely by using the fingers,” said Gong, who had been mainly an oil painter and stumbled upon the technique about 20 years ago. Dabbing his fingers in his oil paint for fun, he said, led him to the discovery “that in China there is such a thing as finger painting, being done for hundreds of years.”

His demonstration was part of the library’s celebration of lunar new year. Wednesday marked the beginning of the Year of the Rooster for Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean people.

Gong spread rice paper on the table, squirted ink into a shallow dish and dipped his favorite drawing instrument: his right thumb, the one with a long nail, which he keeps trimmed to a point.

CHINA NATIVE NAICHANG GONG, 72, demonstrates the centuries-old Chinese technique of painting with the fingertips, hand and fingernails at a library in Gaithersburg, Md.

The outline of an eagle’s head soon appeared. He used his thumb to bring large amounts of ink to the top of the eagle’s wings and trailed the nails of his middle three fingers through it, making the fine wing-feather lines.

Sometimes, he dabbed the pads of his fingers flat against the paper, sometimes he rolled his fingers sideways, until the nails were doing most of the work, making a line that tapered, from thick to thin. His pinkie made the thinnest lines.

“In traditional painting, the brush absorbs the ink,” he said in Chinese. A translator made his descriptions understandable for the library crowd. “The finger doesn’t absorb ink, so the most difficult part is … controlling the ink.”

Using his middle finger, Gong wrote the characters for his name and for the subject of his painting: lao ying, an eagle. He held it up, and the crowd applauded.

Gong, who now lives in Bethesda, Md., is one of a group of modern Chinese painters who have brought back the finger-painting technique. Most of them make traditional landscapes: mountains, trees, flowers, clouds. Gong is one of the few who paints animals and people. His work includes paintings of tigers, nameless monks, famous Chinese leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, as well as George Washington and Queen Elizabeth.