Observation drawing exercise!

I wanted to send this exercise to someone via the Internet but it ended up being considered as spam and failed. So I thought I would post it on the blog. Is it of any interest to you? I can continue to upload further exercises is you wish!

First, a brief introduction! This an observation drawing exercise I learned at the university. Doing this repetively will help you focus on the shapes of things instead of the premade image you have of things.

When you think of an apple, you think of a red ball with a green thingy on top (or a variation on the theme). Reality is of course much different, and although we all objectivaly understand that, we actually don't. I was the first one surprised I really didn't understand!

Anyone, from beginner to master, can learn by doing such exercises. Why don't you give it a try? :D

Exercise #1
...for starters!

First cut a hole the size of a credit card in two pieces of cardboard. Put one of them (say, piece A) on anything you want to draw, with these three conditions:
1- The object you choose has to be bigger than the frame.
2- All or most of the lines inside the frame should be continuous; meaning they should touch the frame in two places.
3- Avoid easily recognizable shapes.
Once you have chosen what to draw, you are not to move the cardboard A again.

You are going to draw in the other piece of cardboard (B). First draw the inside of the rectangle on your sheet of paper so that you can easily remove the cardboard B whenever you want. Use that cardboard B if you want to benchmark the lines you are to draw. You are allowed and welcome to erase, redraw, copy and transfer!.

So the first line you will draw has to cut the space in two egal parts. The 'line' can be formed by a dark/light contrast or a color contrast. In this case, we follow a path formed by the finger's edges and the shadow on the finger. On your drawing on the right, you see that it cuts the image in two very balanced parts.

The two shapes you just created are now independant. The next two lines you will draw have to seperate them in four new shapes. Again, always look for the line that makes two egal parts. It will help you figure out proportions easily.

Again, separate each part in two. There are no more lines to draw on the far right, which is ok.

Same here. Don't forget shadows are also lines! It will help you out if you want push the drawing all the way to grey tones or color. Last step of this drawing - you're done!

Make sure when you draw that you keep comparing the size of the shapes.
For better results, repeat a hundred times.
For super intense very good results, repeat even more!

Give me feed back on this, let me know if anything is unclear! :)

Have fun! :D

This the first exemple I made, but I realise the image is a little to complicated to start with! Come back to it when you are used to more simple ones. ;)

Make sure when you draw that you keep comparing shapes and distance between the lines.

If you want to try out grey tones like in 8 and 9, you should start with black or white zones, and then draw the surounding zones by making sure the contrast between them are the similar. If I keep on with these drawing lessons, I shall spend a post on grey tones though!

Overnight stay at a zen buddhist temple!

Omikuji (bad fortune tied to a tree). I thought this was a Shinto tradition, so I don't know why there were some at a buddhist temple...
For an obscure reason, my camera pixelised and pinkyfied most of my pictures! I could save three of them with my friend Photoshop. :P

As many students from China and Korea are coming for a few weeks to YPU, various Japanese culture oriented activities are being organized. Last Friday, YPU's exchange students (the ones staying for a year or half a year) could tag along and go to Hagi, where we could experience life in a Zen Buddhist temple! Although I think most of the Chinese and Korean students found the experience somewhat painful, all four Quebeker folks loved it!
When we arrived to the temple, we had to sit seiza (on our knees) while the priest read sutras (Buddhist preach). It lasted maybe 10 minutes, but it's more then enough when you are not used to sit seiza! Fortunately Marc, Elliott and I had the tea ceremony class last semester and were used to do it.
After being explained various things, we helped with the preparation of diner and ate (in silence!) a vegetarian meal. Technically, you should eat everything. By everything, I mean that when you are done eating, you have to pour some tea in one of your bowls, wash it with a pickle, pour that tea in the next bowl, wash it, ans so on until you washed all 5 little bowls and plates. When you are done, you should drink the tea and eat the pickle! Not eating everything is not respectful to the life that was offered to you.
And although the food was delicious and the portions not so big (just enough, I thought), every single person at my table (we were about 12) except for me and the teacher did not eat everything. O_o

Then, we had a little class about basic principles of Zen Buddhism. It was SO interesting and what was said made a lot of sense to me. But the most interesting thing was to hear the priest talk about respect and principles of non killing, as the girl next to me was lying on the table in evident boredom and incessantly killing mosquitoes!

Buddhist class! I took the picture so I am not in it.

Next was zazen (sited meditation), which I really liked! If you sit correctly, your back naturally becomes straight and it is not tiring. Well, that's what I thought. It lasted at most 15 minutes, and halfway through a girl felt sick and went out of breath! A teacher and a priest took her away and the rest of us kept on going.

Bedtime was at 9h15 and wakeup time at 6h00! My grand-ma side was really happy and I slept every single minute allowed. :D Still, I was the last one in the meditation room at 6h30. I don't know how I did that. -.-"

We then helped with breakfast, ate it silently and helped with the dishes. When we were done, a monk took out buckets of water and rags. Oh yeah, we swiped all the floors running with our rags, like in animes!!

In the afternoon we went sightseeing in Hagi, which is a place rich in historical monuments and famous for its potters. In "hagi-yaki pottery", "yaki" is "to bake" so it means the "baked things of Hagi"!

From left to right: Jin, Seha, Evelyne, Tei and me.
OMG c'est le monde de la forêt!!

I really liked the temple experience, I would do it again for a week long! When you meditate, you are facing outside the room. That temple didn't have actual walls but only shouji (slidding paper doors), so at night you could hear the frogs and the rain like you were sitting in the forest, and in the morning the opened doors let in refreshing sun rays and you could see the gardens around the temple. It was so relaxing and peaceful! :)

St-Jean au Japon!

Spécial francophone pour ce billet sur la St-Jean que j'ai passé au Japon!
(French special for this post on Quebec's National Holiday!)

De gauche à droite: Elliott, Satsu, Evelyne, me, Sayaka, Marc, Kana et Maya.

C'est le 23 au soir que nous avons réalisé que la St-Jean était à nos portes! Super dernière minute, le lendemain nous demandions à l'école la permission d'utiliser l'espace de feu devant la cafétéria pour faire un barbecue. Heureusement, nous sommes copain-copain avec nos deux personnes ressource Nakashima san et Horie san, qui on poussé un brin pour nous faire permettre d'utiliser l'endroit! Nos amies japonaises se sont également joint à nous pour célébrer la fête du Québec!
Au menu: saucisses, pilons de poulet, crevettes, oignons, aubergines, champignons et patates sucrées. Pas tout-à-fait typiquement québécois, mais quand même! Pour compléter l'ambiance nous avons branché la musique québécoise de nos mp3 sur des hauts-parleurs.

Maya et Kana célèbraient la fête du Québec avec nous!

Comme une St-Jean se doit d'être soulignée par des feux d'artifice, nous sommes allés à la librairie (?!) pour en acheter un paquet. Au Japon, les petits feux d'artifices que l'on tient à la main (un peu comme des feux de Bengale) sont très populaires et en été on peut apparemment en acheter presque partout.
Il était évidement défendu de consommer de l'alcool sur le terrain de l'école; nous sommes donc allés nous installer dans un pré sur le haut d'une colline où nous avons bu une symbolique bière tout en brûlant les feux d'artifices. :D

Bonne fête, Québec!

Ikebana: the art of flower arrangement

Here are the arrangements I made so far in my ikebana class! The flowers are picked on a spicky base in such a way that the flowers are standing by themselves. There are various styles of ikebana, but most commonly the flowers are arranged in a triangle. Every class the teacher picks different flowers to arrange and talks about ikebana styles. There are three main factors to consider when arranging: balance, line and rythm. We get to take the flowers home after the class! :D
Enjoy!

Hotaru matsuri: The fireflies festival!

Last saturday was the day of Yamaguchi city's fireflies festival. I never thought I would see this many people at the same time alongside that river - especially around the stalls where you could hardly walk!

It was very interesting to me that although it was a fireflies festival, people were much more excitted about getting to weat their yukatas (summer kimono), meet up with friends and eat festival food (I must say I was pretty happy myself getting to eat a taiyaki, a fish shaped cake filled with sweet beans paste :D ).
For exemple, I first got there with a japanese friend, but we couldn't see the fireflies yet because it was too early. So we bought some food, ate it, and my friend said "Well, I don't have much interest for fireflies, so I'll go back home right now. I guess you could come back with the other exchange students when the sun is down." I thought, what's the point of coming to this festival then?! Oh, well.
I did come back afterwards and the fireflies were really pretty! But I'll go back again when there is less lights on.

Oh, and here is a bowl I made in my japanese pottery class! :D (It actually is a chawan, a cup to drink tea from in traditional japanese tea ceremony.) The diameter is about 15 cm.

Suibokuga, or indian ink painting

As there were no ink painting classes given at the university, I asked a teacher to help me out finding something outside of the school. I wasn't expecting much, but in the end I could take a special once-a-month class given by a well known artist (濱中応彦, Ohgen Hamanaka) that comes all the way from Osaka to Yamaguchi to teach it! I am so glad!

During the first class, all I did was painting vegetables. First year students usually stick to doing such exercises but as I am going to be there only a few months, they said I could skip a step or two! Yay!

People taking the class with me are all so very nice. Mostly all retired people, they are asking me where I come from and they always have a sister of their granddaughter's husband who's been to Vancouver once. It makes me very happy that my japanese level reached a point where I can have a decent conversation with an adult, because being polite in japanese is not only about manners and appropriate vocabulary! But let's put that aside for now.

A week after my first class they had a group exhibition and they insisted on me participating! They took the eggplant you see there, but I had to sign it properly, say with an "incan" (the red seal). There was no way I could exhibit the work without it, so someone called his friend who makes them incan and asked him to make one by then... for free! O_o

One day trip to Osaka!

Marc, me, Evelyne and Elliott in front of Osaka-jou, one of the most famous castles of Japan!

We thought we had to go to an Air Canada desk to decide on the date of our flight back to Canada before realising we could do it by phone. But then we were already into the mood for going to Osaka, so we went anyways! We rode night buses so we wouldn't have to sleep anywhere, and from 7am to 10pm it was intense Osaka visiting!! Lots of fun, we first visited the famous Osaka Castle and then walked down the streets for window shopping. We meet up with Marc's twin brother and former room-mate who came to visit Japan for three weeks, ate Osaka's trad food (okonomiyaki) and took pictures in a purikura booth!

View from the top of the Castle, one of the two fishes traditionally found on japanese rooftops. They are supposed to protect the building from unlucky events due to bad weather.

Super intense flashly street of Osaka!

Typical purikura booth!
Its particularity is that before it prints the pictures, you can draw, write, add glitters and other super duper cute stuff on it! The printed sheet has only one size, but you can choose how many pictures you want on it so that you can share with many friends.

Osaka style okonomiyaki!
Cabbage and a meat or fish of you choice are mixed to a special doe and cooked like a pancake. It is topped by okonomayi sauce (indispensable ingredient), mayonaise and dried fish flakes. It's really, really good!!

*those two pictures come from Wiki!