more colorful produce

Hokkaido has entered the dormant season where the once-colorful leaves have crumbled to brown dust and snow will soon cover all traces of ground vegetation and even the mis-matched colors of our house roofs and automobiles.

This is when I really start appreciating the colors of our fruits and vegetables. Sure, we have beautiful produce during our brief summers, but I guess I don't appreciate their colors as much as they deserve, because, outside, the leaves on the trees are all shades of green, flowers bloom like pieces of the rainbow, and butterflies flit like floating flower petals.

In the setting of a monochromatic winter, purple-skinned sweet potatoes and persimmons the color of the sun really brighten my world. I picked out a couple samples from my illustrated recipes as evidence.

dust of snow

A friend of mine, a fellow fan of the poetry of Robert Frost, challenged me to make an etegami illustrating Frost's poem "Dust of Snow." I tried one thing after another, and finally had to be satisfied with this etegami collage.

It shows a man's winter cap dusted with snow. I painted the cap on a washi postcard in the traditional Etegami manner, then cut it out and glued it to a sheet of paper which I'd printed all over with the words of the poem in very small blue type. The bold black words were typed over a different sheet of paper which I'd printed all over in very small pink type. Then I cut the bold black words out for gluing onto the card. I kind of like the effect, but you may feel it makes the card look too busy.

Here's a different sort of attempt, a straight etegami with the crow taking center stage. The words are written in the large, blotchy letters typically produced by a bamboo dip pen. The awkwardness of this one has a sort of appeal too.

Which do you prefer?

illustration friday (winter)

Harness bells accompanied by a quote from one of my favorite winter poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. This poem always brings back fond memories from my childhood, before paved roads and snowplows became common in rural Hokkaido, and we rode in horse-drawn sleds to visit our friends during the New Year holiday.

new year's cards

Japan has a long tradition of exchanging New Year's greetings in writing, apparently going as far back as the Nara period (AD 700s). It wasn't until 1873, when the Japan Postal Service began to print standardized postcards requiring less postage than an ordinary letter, that the idea of postcard greetings began to catch on. In 1899, the current system of nenga yuubin (New Year mail) was conceived, in which all mail marked as New Year's greetings, and which is posted within a specific time frame in December, will be delivered en mass on New Year's Day. There are lots of other delightful historical details on the subject that I don't have room to post here, but maybe you can read them for yourself on Wikipedia Japan (in Japanese only, sorry).

There are many cool things about traditional Japanese New Year's cards, not the least of which is how images and words are used. Certain images are associated with the New Year holiday specifically, and with spring (which New Year's day is symbolically the start of) in general. For example, the etegami I drew for New Year's 2009 depicts sprouting water chestnuts (water caltrops). The sprouts make it a felicitous image and conducive to word play, a common device with etegami in general, but especially at New Year's. The accompanying words translate roughly to: [the new year brings with it] the sprouts of new possibilities.

For New Year's 2010, I made several new designs. One depicts a toy top, symbolic of the new year because it is one of a group of traditional toys that children used to play with during the New Year holidays. The accompanying words say: May 2010 be a well-balanced year [for you]. Word play again. The rest of my holiday etegami are variations on tiger images, because 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. I've posted one of these here. The animal representing a particular year is probably the most common motif for Japanese New Year's cards.

Not all New Year's cards are etegami, of course. These days most people whip up greeting cards on their computers, using stock images and formulaic words. If you have over 100 people on your greeting card list, as I do, it really is too much to expect of yourself to hand-make each one. What I do is draw several original designs, and color-copy my favorites to send to the people on my list. For my fellow etegami artists, though, I do make an effort to send original cards only.

Tell me what kind of cards you will be sending this year. Something hand-made I hope. After the holidays I plan to post a sample of some of the etegami cards I receive from my Japanese etegami colleagues.