Seika classes EXTRA: Paper making saturdays

 A month or 2 ago I learned about the amazing opportunity to follow extra, specialized classes on the Saturdays and as Seika student you payed way less than outsiders, who can also follow these classes making them a pleasant mix of old and young, student and non-student.
I really wanted to take some extra class to learn a new technique, so I picked up the "Assembly hour & garden" brochure. I have no clue why it has such a strange name, we are not in a garden and the classes take about 4 hours for 5 Saturdays.
Anyway, going through their brochure there were options such a making your own bento box out of glass, Japanese scroll making, rap music class, machine sewing and, my personal pick, paper making!
I have always wanted to know how to make my own paper as my main way of making work is print making and sometimes finding the right paper for pressing my prints on and for what you envision is horrible, especially in NL (Japan is paper heaven!)

Seika classes: Etching

As one of my optional classes I picked etching class for the friday.
I got to choose between Visual Media and Etching, but chose etching in the end because I love making prints and because I had never done copper plate printing before and it is something I can do back in NL too.
At the beginning of my first class I got a sheet with the semester overview, painstakingly translated by my etching teacher who I found out is very keen on learning English.

Every 3 weeks we got to learn a new etching technique and after that for each technique 2 weeks to experiment with it. I total I will be learning 4 new techniques. As I am writing this I have learned 3 already and this coming friday will be the fourth and final technique.

Seika Open Campus.

Yesterday, on sunday June 8th, Seika held an open campus for future students.
Most people visiting were highschool students with their parents. Surprisingly enough most of the highschool students were girls.
There were alot of festivities and every faculty showed their best works.
Workshops were also given for free throughout the whole campus like textile dying, screenprinting and etching.

Seika classes: Illustration, making a picturebook

The final assignment given to us for the end of the semester was to make a 14 page picture book with a dust jacket around it. The theme for the picturebook was Little Red Riding Hood, the theme we worked on last assignment. But seeing we had the freedom to do anything with the story made me decide to turn it into a new story with the only relation being the color red.
I wrote a new story based on Japanese traditional culture and folklore.

Seika Classes: Nihonga, The art of Japanese painting

At the start of my time at Seika I got to choose my own classes, a wonderful privilege. For the monday I had the option to choose from either Screenprinting, which I love but already done. Or Nihonga, the art of Japanese painting. I asked Oha-san to explain the course to me. He said "you will be preparing your own pigments and will use them to paint animals and flowers which you will study, then in the last few weeks you will learn how to work with gold leaf and you will make your own Japanese fan.
This sounded so interesting I right away dropped the thought of screen printing, I wanted to learn this old Japanese painting technique, because that is what I came here for, to learn new techniques and skills.

Seika Classes: Illustration, the Little Red Riding-hood assignment

The assignment:

In the third week after my arrival in Japan I finally started my illustration class assignment. We were given the assignment to make a picturebook image for the story of the classic Grimm story “Little Red Riding-hood”.

Aoi Matsuri

On May 15th I was insane enough to wake up at 6:00 and to actually be sitting on a little blanket with sandwich in hand at 8:00 on the front-row in the Imperial Palace garden.
Why would I do such a thing on my free thursday you ask? Because I had been told 1 out of the top 3 festivals in Kyoto would start there at 10:30, the Aoi Matsuri. And to have the best view you HAD to be there at 8...
There was in the end so it seemed, no need to be there at 8 as there were still loads of front-row spots left around 10am.