Hokusai's Wave

Hokusai was a Japanese printmaker most well-known for his series titled Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji. Mt. Fuji is very important to the Japanese due to religious reasons. Of the series, The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the most famous. The print shows a menacing wave looking to crash down upon a small Mt. Fuji in the distance. The print symbolizes the everlasting nature of the mountain. While the waves will come and go, the mountain will always be there.

This was a project that I got from Laura Lohmann over at Painted Paper. You can check out her project details here.

​Our first day, we painted using black and white. Students started with white in the middle of their paper. They painted from the middle of their paper to about halfway between the middle and the bottom of their paper. Then they used black and started from the bottom and worked their way up to where they stopped with the white. Some of the black would mix with the white and create a gradient from white to grey to black. We talked about how when a color goes from light to dark, we call that value.

The second day, they drew a large "C" shape on the top of their black and white value painting. From the top of the "C", they drew a diagonal line downward. This formed a large menacing wave. They painted their newly drawn wave with blue, as well as painting over their value painting from last class. When they painted the blue over their value painting, it made the top of the wave lighter and the bottom of the wave darker, creating a blue value scale. Then they used white paint to paint along the top of their wave, as well as some ripples in the water. Lastly, they dabbed some white paint along the top of the wave to make it look like spraying water.