Sunday, December 20, 2015

Japan sketchbook - 4

Switchback 26
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.