The Great Wave

I'm so excited about having finished another Resolution Illustration that I'm posting it immediately, though I'd originally planned to post at least a few of them together. I'm conscious of having a large gap of a couple of weeks to fill, so to make up for that here's the story behind this particular resolution:  

In a nutshell, I need to drink more. That's not what it sounds like - I don't mean I need to steep myself in alcohol with all the frequency of a Japanese bullet train (incidentally, my boyfriend's nonchalant description of his own drinking habits is the suggestive but tantalisingly ambiguous, "not much, but often"!). Me hitting the bars on even a semi-regular basis would be a disaster, since I have fairly low alcohol tolerance; what I actually mean is that I have a tendency to forget to drink and get dehydrated, so I need to drink more water more regularly to prevent that from happening.  

I've included an image of Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830-32) because I've used it as a reference not just for this piece but also for countless others over the years. It's such an iconic piece that it's one of the first things I think of when I think of the sea in art, and I love how it's so stylised but still so animated and evocative. It's also incredibly detailed for what at first glance seems such a straightforward image: it took me a while to notice that the most distant "wave" is actually Japan's Mount Fuji, and even then I might have had a bit of help! I'd love to see an original of this print - apparently there are lots of different copies of it around the world, including in the British Museum in London - but until then I found the above image on the Metropolian Museum of Art website. The page has a lot more information - click here to have a look.  

This last image is an intermediary stage in the making of the illustration, because I love seeing that kind of thing on other blogs! For the uninitiated/relative novices like me, this is the isolated line-art, which was created in Photoshop by going over the lines of the original scanned drawing in sections on different layers, before they were then collated into a single layer. The collation was actually one of the last steps I did after adding fill beneath the layers as appropriate to build up a sort of 3D jigsaw of the whole image, but this is how all of the finished outlines would have looked like without fill added. 

I'd better get going - it's a work day tomorrow. Maybe with another new post? Optimistic!  

P.S. I actually do have a dress with that print on it - points for accuracy!  

Music: Randy Crawford - One Day I'll Fly Away 

Materials: HB pencil, Photoshop 7