I met up with my supervisor at the beginning of this week and we had a talk about the progress that I’ve made so far, he was a little worried when I didn’t have anything really physical to show him. He recommended that this week I spend my time looking into different Japanese art and print techniques and seeing if I could practice these techniques. So this week I spent a lot of my time trying different things.
The main ones that I tried were:
Suminagashi (墨 流 し), this is the art of using ink on top of water to create prints. You put ink on the surface of the water and either let the water flow naturally or gently stir the water to create different patterns, you then place a page on the waters surface and then lift it out. When you lift the page out the ink will have transferred to the paper, creating the print.
Shodō (書道), this is a type of Japanese calligraphy. It’s mostly the same as most forms of calligraphy, except most practitioners of Shodō use a specific type of brush. I did try this but I didn’t have the right type of brush so the form of the kanji didn’t end up looking right.
The third thing I looked at isn’t actually a Japanese art technique but I wanted to try it out anyway, it was Gold Leafing. Like I said I wanted to try it out so I spent a few hours one of the days just figuring out how to do it and then how to make it look good, which didn’t really happen but I tried.
