Art Attack! #56: Minimalist Kanagawa Wave 🌊

taco.cat (67)in OnChainArt • 4 years ago

Hey Steemit!

We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!

Ever since I started digital art, I've been practising it a lot; especially familiarising myself with the interface and tools in Clip Studio Paint. So it'd been a while since I'd done a physical art piece and I'd been missing it quite a bit. I didn't want to slack off on my physical art techniques either so I decided to try doing another minimalist art piece!

Japan is one of my favourite travel destinations and I'm sure everyone knows of the famous print by Hokusai - The Great Wave off Kanagawa! I tried painting a version of that a long time ago in a ramen bowl but unfortunately it didn't turn out so well and I wasn't really that happy with it.

So I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to redeem myself with this piece and try it out in my minimalist style instead! The colour would definitely be too difficult for me to emulate that's for sure.

And since Japan's flag is white with a red circle in the middle, it only made sense that I draw it inside a circle, which also suits my minimalist style as well. This was a previous piece I did:

Anyway, I wanted to keep it black and white but try to be more accurate this time so I went about searching for some vectors to reference. These are some I found:

Source: pinterest

Source: HiClipart

Source: pinterest

I think you can tell where I'm going with this. I didn't want to just draw the wave and Mt Fuji, and I also wanted to include the akatsuki clouds from the previous piece, along with the signature red sun.

So this was my first draft, before I realise I need a lot of help, and went about searching for vectors to reference.

I realise the wave itself has so many details that it's hard to even know where to start, but I just went about with the initial outline and filled in the details later. Eventually, I got this!

I decided to leave out the details in the foreground wave and opted to do the simpler Japanese wave instead, kinda like this:

Source: WallpaperAccess

But I realise this pattern only works if they're drawn smaller, and it kinda looks like the wifi signal a little bit, so I decided to make it bigger. After outlining, I got this:

And finally, after a couple more details, this is the final piece!

Unfortunately I kinda smudged the sun rays a little bit, but I think other than a few smudges here and there I actually really love this piece! I thought I managed to capture the essence of the original Kanagawa Wave print pretty well, and I think I got the details down too.

I really like this (mostly) black-and-white version as well! Doubtful that I'll attempt a colour version since it's pretty difficult and I don't want my version to look too similar to the original since it's been done to death.

Really liking this one though, and I hope you do too! Thanks so much for reading!