Category: Artwork

This painting has been a little while in the making, due to business at work, and indecision about what to do with the water… I’m still not sure that I’m happy with it. It was originally a lot more painterly than typical ukiyoe, which usually has much smoother and simpler gradients… I played around with both extremes, and I couldn’t really decide one one… the painterly water looked nice, I thought, but didn’t fit the style of the rest of the picture. I eventually settled on somewhere in between the two, and here is the result:

This place is in a town called Mikuni here in Fukui, at a beach called Mikuni Sunset Beach. It’s a very famous and very pretty beach with many ryokans (Japanese traditional inns) along the waterfront. It’s just south of the Tojimbo cliffs, a very popular suicide destination in Japan. Mikuni is where I saw the big fireworks festival over Obon week.

It looks like the cool weather is here to stay! It’s so fantastic. This week is actually surprisingly chilly — today is rainy and my toes are a bit cold. But I’m relishing the feeling. The smell is great, and the mountain outside my window is covered in mist, so it looks very pretty (and very fantasy-like).

I was planning on going to the Katsuyama dinosaur museum today, but since it’s rainy I wasn’t in the mood to figure out how to commute across the prefecture on my own. I guess I’ll have to put it off for another week. Le sigh.

Back in June I started working on the next 100 Famous of Views of Philadelphia painting, and never ended up finishing it due to business getting ready for Japan… So I tucked it away for a rainy day. And, well, today is a rainy day. So I finished it up and made it into a nice little fall scene:
Night View of City HallWork this week was good, despite the intense pain early in the week. The highlights of the week were finding a funny typo in a book (I’ll post it later on), and making a student laugh until tears. She takes a private lesson to improve her English for work, and after our practice dialogs I hang up the “bonus dialogs” for extra practice. She somehow misheard me and when I turned around she looked at me with wide eyes and said, “Donuts dialog??” I think I really got her hopes up right there. When she realized what I said she completely lost it, which is awesome because she’s usually so quiet and serious during class.Now I guess I should go grocery shopping. I need to get out of the house for a bit. Plus I want something sweet. (Dang this rain! I’ve really wanted to go to Mr. Donut ever since that class!)

It’s been a fairly slow undertaking, but it’s as good as done for now… I want to add some humans and some more atmospheric background — mountains and such — in the future, but for now…