Watercolour and crayon sketch
©2015 Charlene Brown
The next day we went up to the Toshugo Shrine at
Nikko in the mountains north of Tokyo. The famously ornate Nikko Gate which, with its
surrounding structures, would have made a great (and extremely difficult) panorama
painting, has been under wraps for several months... but they have lots of
other good stuff and we marveled at it all. My alternate ‘Nikko’ painting was
better suited to a square format than to this sketchbook. I wrote a blog post about it a couple of
weeks ago.
Our return to Tokyo via Lake Chuzenji at the top of
the spectacular Kegon waterfall (three metres short of Niagara, 20 switchbacks
up and 28 switchbacks down) was quite fantastic. This sketch shows the incredible
number of switchbacks visible through the lacy interwoven evergreen and brilliant
red foliage on our descent through the precipitous mountain forest.
