ROOM TO IMPROVE

 In last week's post, I included a sketch page about traditions from Japan that included drawings of a Kabuki actor, sake barrels, and a young woman in a kimono. I placed them around the page and quickly filled the space with other traditional Japanese images including a torii gate, a sculpted tree, and Mt. Fuji. I didn't give myself time to think carefully about the placement of these images, but the sketch was good enough. But during the day after posting my blog, I kept thinking back about the sketch and knew I wasn't satisfied with the result. I decided to start over to see if I could be more mindful of design elements drilled into me in art school to create a better composition, using relationships between elements such as color, size, and shape.

 I have always enjoyed looking at an artist's sketches at museum exhibits more than their finished work. The sketches reveal a lot about how the artist's mind works. Showing the steps I took with this sketch could be helpful to help understand what goes into making a piece of art. 

First version with green

My first sketch needed something so I put a ribbon of green and embedded the words, Japan and Nihon, into the green space. The green helped to tie the various images together, but it still felt jumbled to me. I also didn't like the top part of the kimono. It looked muddy instead of the beautiful fabric that a kimono would often show.

Version posted to my blog last week with green ribbon added

To start over, I went back to tracing paper and traced over the shapes from the original. I made the torii the dominant feature in the center of the page. I knew that its reddish color would bring the eye there first. I moved the shapes around so they weren't as randomly placed as the original. I also made sure that each image touched something else on the page.

Rough draft on tracing paper

 

I used black markers to outline the images as well as the space around them. I painted most of the images with watercolor. I made sure that I limited the number of colors and had each color placed somewhere more than once on the page. Once I had finished that, I looked again and still felt that something was missing. I used a black marker to connect the images together within the rectangle. I think it looks better, don't you?

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This week in San Francisco is Fleet Week, a pageant celebrating our sea and air military. While I am writing this, I am also listening to the roar of jet planes as they practice close maneuvers in the sky. They are amazing to watch. The birds are silent. Usually, the birds scream after loud noises such as fireworks, but maybe Fleet Week, which has occurred for more than 20 years, is already on their calendar and they have found respite elsewhere.

FINDING YOUR WAY

I participated in Sheila Delgado's September challenge.
Here are some of the pieces I did for the daily challenges.

"Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms."  Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang's thoughtful idea graced the back cover of Poetry Magazine recently. Reading the sentence reminded me of our move to Toyko. We joined with numerous expats from all over the world in a city crammed with over 21 million people. Bill's company gave us lots of move-in information, but the best was a booklet titled "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Most of the expats, like us, stayed only for three or four years and moved on to another expat assignment, while a few put down roots that went deep into the Japanese soil. In either case, a move out of our own country changed and challenged us.

In the first few weeks after moving to Tokyo, we spent almost every day walking our neighborhood, trying out the subways, and looking for something familiar. We lived in Minami Azabu, a district near the center of Tokyo where many expats lived. National Azabu, the local grocery store carried some Western products such as muesli, but many Americans shopped through the Foreign Buyers Club, an early delivery service, to acquire flour, American cereals, and Pop-Tarts. On nearby Hiroo Shopping Street, we found La Jolla, a Mexican restaurant that gave our son something familiar. The staff embraced him with joy. We slowly found other places that became our go-to places, a creperie on a back street off of Omotesando, an elegant tree-lined shopping street near Meiji Shrine, an Italian restaurant around the corner from our apartment, a cafe with dense hot chocolate, much better than the kind we made at home, and Itoya, with its bookstore and floors filled with an array of art materials and office supplies. Those simple connections to our previous life allowed us to step into a world we grew to love, and which challenged our beliefs and values.

Traditional Japan

Learning the language became the biggest hurdle in Tokyo. We came from a country with a language based on the Roman alphabet with 26 letters. We faced a language with 2136 characters in daily use and drawn with a brush, read mainly vertically instead of horizontally, and based on Chinese kanji symbols. We lost our literacy when we arrived as we tried to decipher signage and documents written in kanji and the two other Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana). Nothing was familiar. We began to understand how difficult it is for someone to move permanently to another country while trying to learn a different language and culture. An expat has choices: to hide from the overwhelming, to grow bitter, or to embrace the challenge of learning and adapting to a new life and new standards. During our learning curve, we went through all of those phases.

When we returned permanently to the United States after almost six years in two different countries, our son, who was entering high school, said, "I wouldn't be the same person that I am if I had stayed in Danville."

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September Window View

While diving down a Rabbit Hole on the Internet, I found this intriguing challenge, which offers activities close to water in the winter. Bodies of water are appealing to me and I find it calming to be near the ocean. Does water have the same effect on you?

Blue Mind Challenge:

https://www.bluetonic.org.uk/winterchallenge