Yasunari Kawabata

The first Japanese author to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata is a name I had regrettably not heard before today. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his short story "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket", I purchased his "Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories" - a series of short stories written over the span of his career - and greatly look forward to reading them!

I picked up also the collection of short stories "A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories" by Primo Levi (an Italian writer) and "Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories" by Stuart Dybek - an American author whose excellent article "The Surprising Power of Stories That Are Shorter Than Short Stories" introduced me to both previously named writers. In it, he discusses the dual visuality of haiku in their original form, speaks of poetry in fiction, and wraps up the article with the beautiful finishing lines: "Even though we all write on computers now, I still think of writing as words on paper. And when you write a story or a poem, it just illuminates. Meaning shines through words like light through cut paper, beaming out into the night, and projecting its image onto another person’s heart."

Enhanced Illustration by Bill Wright

Interested in mixing traditional and digital illustration?
Last year I attended a short course at Central Saint Martins under Bill Wright, and he's now offering the same course as an online class - for £25! The live course continues to cost £550, and with the online course you get everything I got at the live course. I cannot emphasize enough what a steal this is - Bill is an excellent instructor, bringing in self-made videos, Adobe Certified Expert assistants, a thorough knowledge of both illustration techniques and the business of selling your work, and a willingness to impart all his knowledge in a clear and concise way.

Sound interesting? What if I said that you don't need prior knowledge of how to use Photoshop - or any technical knowledge when it comes to illustration? You'll get great tutorials for both, as well as a group of international and diverse artists working and learning alongside you. If you already know one - or both - then that's great, too! I already knew how to illustrate and use Photoshop before taking the course, but still got great advice, learned about working in different fields, met some very talented people, and created new and fresh art.

The online course isn't as time-limited as the live one, and you'll get a series of lessons (with written discussion, assignments, illustrations and video links) over a period of 7 weeks. Have a poke around his website (eshortcourses.uk) and the facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/156679341345879/), and if you have any questions or want to sign up, send him an email under billwrightmail@gmail.com. Go for it!

Animal Paintings

I'm not sure why I'm so into drawing animals lately, but it's a lot of fun! After the Stag Terms post a few weeks ago I sketched a few more animals, and today I started putting them together with texturing and color in Photoshop. More to follow!

Enhanced Illustration - Pencil, Pen, Paint and Pixels

Last week I was in London for a short course at Central Saint Martins. Part of the University of the Arts London, CSM is best known for its fashion department, having helped to prominence notable alumni such as Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton, John Galliano, and Zac Posen (among many other notable fashion designers). But far from preferring the fashion department over all others, CSM has a huge variety of courses - and a truly excellent selection of short courses.

Tempted by several of their offers, I finally settled on a course titled "Enhanced Illustration - Pencil, Pen, Paint and Pixels". The course description promises to teach students to manipulate and combine hand-drawn elements in Photoshop, "all the while mantaining a personal, hand-crafted look to your resulting illustrations". As you'll have noticed from previous blog entries, I enjoy combining traditional and digital elements (the Japanese Tea Ceremony illustration comes to mind), but I booked this course when I hadn't yet started fiddling around with things much on my own, and had hoped to learn from this course the best methods to clean up a sketch and combine elements.

Now, I had learned a fair amount of this during my studies at the IADE Madrid, but I felt I was still lacking in professionalism. Unfortunately(?), in the months between booking the course and taking it, I played around a lot with Photoshop and my own drawings, finding that cleaning up my sketches tended to work better with ctrl+M (Curves) than fiddling with Brightness and Contrast, and that layering colors over lineart worked really well with a layer style called Multiply. (I spent quite some time playing around with all the layer styles to find out how they'd react - time well spent!) Imagine my dismay when the only Photoshop things the course really focused on were Brightness and Contrast, Hue/Saturation (ctrl+U), and Multiply! The rest was all taking scanned traditional elements and rearranging them in Photoshop.

So I didn't learn anything about Photoshop during the course - but I still found the course immensely interesting, and at times quite illuminating. The instructor, Bill Wright, was an excellent lecturer, bringing in videos, examples of previous students' work, and even other people to help and inspire us. While I didn't learn anything new about Photoshop, I learned about a professional illustrator's work, what different types of illustration there are, and tried out forms of illustration I had never tried previously - such as newspaper illustration.

For that project, we were each allowed to choose a newspaper article from a selection Bill brought along, and then had to present him with a concept before moving on to create a fitting illustration. He approved my concept for this tennis-themed article with little discussion, but gave me a lot of useful feedback during the process of creating the final illustration. The most valuable advice was to crop the image, zooming in and focusing on the action - and it really pulled it together. Before I cropped it, it looked something like this:

Still cute, but... nowhere near as good. (I also did away with the clouds.)

Then, there were all the other students. All female but for one lone male, we all came from different professions and walks of life, with people hailing from the UK, Germany, Chile, Jordan, and other countries. Twice during the week we printed out the work we'd done that far and gave each other feedback, saying what we thought turned out well and, sometimes, what we thought wasn't so great. For many pieces I found my tastes didn't quite match those of most others, but that made it quite interesting, actually.

I asked my two favorite artists there to let me share their projects on my blog, so check this out: Our first assignment was to take the concept 'kitchen' and draw objects, later assembling those into a colorful composition in Photoshop. Here's my end result, followed by the work of Dina Fawakhiri (from Jordan) and Bernardita Errázuriz (from Chile).

Sophie-Therese Lupas

Dina Fawakhiri

Bernardita Errázuriz

Aren't theirs gorgeous? Mine pales in comparison, though the image is refreshing when on its own. Dina and Bernie used such vibrant colors and powerful compositions - and I love the bold lineart.

They also gave me permission to post their final projects, for which we were to create at least two illustrations with a common theme and present them on the final day of the course. I chose to illustrate the hostel I was staying at (click on the images to see them bigger):

Dina did three beautiful illustrations with a theme of finding one's way to a woman's heart:

And Bernardita did a lovely collection of illustrations based on her family.

Lovely, aren't they? Thank you, Dina and Bernie, for letting me put them up here. And a reminder to everyone reading this: Just click on any photo (in the blog post) to see it bigger! The details are really worth looking at.

In conclusion, the trip to London decidedly was worth it! I hope the other participants feel that way, too.

Pentatonix WIP

Today I spent a considerable number of hours working on some fanart of Pentatonix, my favorite a cappella group. They do wonderful covers of popular songs, and both I and Mom love them! If you don't know them yet, a good place to start would be these two videos:

Evolution of Music by Pentatonix

Pentatonix on Sesame Street!

Now, the fanart is still a work in progress (WIP), but here's how it's coming along! I've done most of the line work, so the next step will be to even out the skin color that I just slapped down. It's too late to continue working on it now, and I'm away for the weekend (seeing as it's Easter and all!), so I'm not sure when I'll continue working on this! Haven't decided yet whether I'm taking along my laptop or not.

Scott looks kinda creepy as a floating head. Sorry, Scott! I'm working off a promotional photo of theirs, but might rearrange them a little bit further on. I'm not planning on painting the rest of their bodies, so this set-up isn't optimal!

Just realized that I never did finish that turtle rider I started painting some time ago. Hmmm...

Anywho, have a happy Easter!

Japanese Tea Ceremony

The other day I started reading up on the Japanese tea ceremony. It's such a complex and interesting tradition that I rapidly found myself caught up in it, reading about the tools, phrases, and of course, the tea.

The complex ceremony evolved due to the scarcity of tea from the Nara to the Heian period (794-1192), making tea a valuable and treasured beverage. From then on, the tea ceremony evolved until reaching the level of detail and sense of ritual that it has today. (Read about the influence of the Samurai and zen monks on the tea ceremony here!)

Called chanoyu (茶の湯), the Japanese tea ceremony is the ritualistic preparation of matcha (抹茶), powdered green tea. There is another, less common style using sencha - loose tea leaves like the ones we are familiar with. This tea ceremony is called senchado (煎茶道).
Matcha, however, is made from shade-grown tea leaves that are steamed and laid out flat to dry; as a result they crumble somewhat, and at this stage the tea is called tencha (碾茶). Tencha is also supposed to be very delicious, but if the tea leaves are taken and de-stemmed, de-veined, and ground, then you end up with matcha - a fine, vivid green powder that has great health benefits. One glass of matcha supposedly equals 10 glasses of regular green tea in terms of nutritional value and antioxidant content. Impressive!

If you had a look at the kanji (Chinese symbols), you'll have noticed that each one contains the kanji 茶, cha, which means tea. Japanese people will respectfully call tea "o-cha", as O is a prefix that shows respect. "O-cha" in Japan tends to refer to green tea, and Western black tea is commonly referred to as "koucha" (紅茶), which literally means "red tea".

Interestingly, matcha has experienced a surge in popularity outside Japan, being sold the world over in matcha lattes, chocolates, cakes, and a variety of other forms. If you should want to try matcha yourself, there's a very thorough and interesting review of matcha brands here!

The tea ceremony, however, remains an integral part of Japanese culture. 

I found it fascinating to read about the chanoyu (tea ceremony with matcha), and watched this video showing tea being prepared for two women. It takes a little while for things to be set up, so if you skip to 5:30 you'll see the woman preparing the tea (called a Teishu - the host of the tea ceremony) carefully folding a cloth napkin to wipe the lid of the container holding the matcha powder. The way she folds the cloth with slow deliberation into a shape that reminds of origami, then wipes the lid with careful strokes in the shape of the letter ko, こ, is captivating. Each gesture is clearly choreographed, the weight of tradition behind it.

Also of particular interest to me are the phrases and expressions used during the ceremony; it's a choreographed conversation between the Teishu (host) and Shokyaku (main guest), with only occasional comments between the guests. The Shokyaku, regardless of how many guests are present, is the only one to speak with the host.

Then, there are the items that the guests carry on them - if in the video you skip to 11 minutes, you'll see the younger guest pull a napkin out of the overlap of her kimono at chest height, proceeding to use it as a sort of dish to eat one of the provided candies. I was so surprised when she pulled the napkin seemingly out of nowhere!


There is a lot more to say about the tea ceremony, but these are the main points that were interesting to me. I definitely want to enjoy a proper cup of matcha someday! If you want to read more about the chanoyu, I highly recommend the webside www.japanese-tea-ceremony.net.

Bindi

Today I was reading up a bit on the bindi and tilaka, two forehead markings that characterize, but are not limited to, Hinduism.

The red dot on this lady's forehead is a bindi, a decoration worn in South and Southeast Asia.

I got onto this topic when reading about Indian widows celebrating Holi, the festival of colors. The topic matter is both saddening and horrifying (as apparently in some places widows are cast out and shunned after the deaths of their husbands), but I found myself intrigued by the markings on their foreheads. I knew about the bindi, of course, but the long, silver or gold markings surprised me. (To see the photos, click on the link - both the text and photos are worth a few minutes!)

Looking into it a bit, I found that the markings must be what is called tilaka, and presumably they only applied the color for the festival, though it's also possible that they wear it on a daily basis. The different styles of tilaka (or sect-markings) are quite neat, and though I didn't recognize any of the markings below on the photos, here are an assortment of tilaka styles as found on wikipedia:

While I could not quite figure out the origin or meaning behind the tilaka, the placement of both it and the bindi on the forehead is due to the sixth chakra, ajna, being positioned there. As such, the bindi represents the third eye.

Interesting, no? If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to hear about it! Comments are welcome.

Poem Illustrations

A little glimpse at what I'm currently working on...

"What's that?" chirped Ben, a baby bird,
And, pointing with a tiny wing,
He lifted wide his beak to sing,
"What's that?  What's that?  of everything,
To learn another brand new word.

Poem excerpt courtesy of Anastasia C. Moser, illustration by Sophie-Therese Lupas.