Demonstration Art

From a bijin-ga by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753 - 1806). See discussion.

Calligraphy

The kanji characters below represent both the words boke (Japanese quince) and mokkō (a pattern based on the interior appearance of a quince fruit cross section). Note that there is a slight difference between the second of the two characters and the version that the computer brings up:

瓜

My version is verified by three Japanese dictionaries. The difference may be due to ongoing revisions being made to kanji characters to simplify them, I don't know if that is the reason here. In any case, these kanji are for those who would like to practice their calligraphy.

Sketches

These relatively simple sketches of quince blossoms are for practice. They are the same except that after doing the sumi (black & white) version, I copied it and filled in the color. The reason the background on the sumi version is so grey is that some of the lines came out so light after scanning that I needed to enhance the picture. The background darkened along with the lines. Because of the gansai, that wasn't a problem with the color version.

Demonstration Painting

My demonstration painting of quince blossoms illustrates three painting techniques; senbyō-hō (bone or line strokes), mokkotsu-hō (boneless strokes), and kōrokutensai-hō. The latter technique combines the first two. It doesn't matter which is painted first.