Art Attack! #4: Immortalising A 'Once in a Lifetime' Moment 🌄

taco.cat (67)in #art • 4 years ago (edited)

Hey Steemit!

It's Art Attack time yet again! Yay!
So in the last post, I showcased the piece I did for Sean's birthday back in 2018, which was a "collage" of sorts. It was the iconic Dotonbori (in Osaka, Japan) scene with the signboards customised to everything that Sean likes!

If you read the last post, you'd know that this wasn't my initial idea. My first thought was actually a Travel Japan type of poster, something similar to this (since Japan is our favourite country):

Source: juniqe.com

However, I wasn't into painting at the time, and colouring would be a real chore so I had to scrap it. BUT, in 2019, I started getting into watercolour painting and when Sean's birthday rolled around again, I decided to go for it!

But of course, I wanted my gift to be unique, so I decided to modify it a little bit.
One of my favourite memories of all our trips to Japan was staying in a fancy resort called La Vista near Lake Kawaguchi and waking up to the view of Mt. Fuji.

It was such a uniquely awesome experience, and I was so happy to share that with Sean during Valentine's Day 2019! We even walked right up to the lake and got as close to Mt Fuji as I most likely will ever be.

Both of us really enjoyed that trip, and getting to see that view at the lake is definitely one of our highlights. So I thought it'd be really neat to immortalise the memory of that trip in a painting! And when I saw this image, it gave me an idea:

We couldn't take a nice photo of us together at the lake, since it was ridiculously windy (and pretty cold as a result) at the time. So I thought I'd draw us admiring Mt. Fuji together instead. I didn't have much experience drawing people (and tbh I am still pretty bad at it), so I thought drawing our backs would be a good start at least.

Here's my first draft:

I thought that was pretty okay, but I figured if I was gonna draw the 2 of us standing together, I might as well draw us like how we would normally stand, which is more like this:

Granted, I'm not that tall in real life, but if I was to be more accurate, my head wouldn't be seen much from the back, which is kinda hard to visualise (since I've never actually seen what we look like from the back before). I think this draft looked pretty good, so it was time to outline!

Then it was time to paint! This was me using a new sketchbook I bought from Japan, so I was quite hesitant since I didn't know how absorbent the paper was, and how my watercolours were gonna look on it. *sigh* the woes of physical art. But thankfully, it turned out pretty alright.

I actually tried to be as accurate as possible with Sean's outfit, and I think it's pretty darn close to what he wore when we went down to the lake.

I know my colours aren't as accurate, but I wanted to make sure there was no colour clashing with the background, which I decided to make a sunset. I know it's kinda the opposite of our experience (since we viewed it at sunrise), but I didn't want to make the whole thing blue, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I had some trouble with the sakura branch, and I was kinda panicky because I made the background too pink and reddish on top which I thought might've clashed with the sakura a little bit. That, and it was kinda looking more like a bruise than flowers, but oh well.

For the other side of the painting I decided to try out some calligraphy and write Sean's favourite Japanese four-character idiom, Ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会).

It probably looks more like if primary school children wrote Japanese/Chinese characters with a brush, but my brushes weren't made for calligraphy anyway.

A literal translation of ichi-go ichi-e is "one time, one meeting", or "once in a lifetime encounter". This idiom reminds people to cherish any meeting or encounter, citing the fact that any moment in life cannot be repeated, which I thought was really apt because meeting Sean was definitely a once in a lifetime moment for me. # toocheesy?

Well anyway, here's the final product!

I think I definitely made the sky a tad too pinkish on top, but other than that, I thought it looked pretty good! I especially loved how well the paper made the lake look. It was super easy to spread the paint around and make it looked smooth like water itself.

This was probably one of the most colourful paintings I've ever done, and I really like it! I love playing around with different colours, and now with paint it's so much easier to do so. I remember looking at this piece every day when I woke up (since it was on our wall) and feeling really good with what I created. And I'm so glad Sean liked it too!

Thanks so much for reading!