We propose an interactive construction method of 3D objects from Chinese ink paintings for the challenge problem of generating the Chinese ink animation. Marching Cube method is the popular method of 3D modeling; however, it has the limitation on constructing the objects with complex shapes by lines in Chinese ink paintings. Based on our method, we develop a software system for constructing 3D objects interactively by the manual input of brush strokes from the Chinese ink paintings. And then the system can generate 3D objects with 2D surface mesh and 3D skinned mesh automatically. Finally, the system renders them with the original ink effect textures of input image. Our experiments show that the approach is suitable for converting 2D painting image into 3D objects. This work would be helpful for the problem of generating 3D animation of Chinese ink painting. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015.