Kaguya-Hime, the Moon Princess

I'm planning to do a series of artworks based on an old, 10th century, Japanese folklore tale called The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.

The story's main character, Kaguya-Hime, is a princess from the moon who grows up on Earth and lives with an old couple. She is found as a child by the old man while he is cutting bamboo one day.

Sometime later, Kaguya-Hime grows up into a beautiful lady and five noblemen come to the old couple's home and ask Kaguya-Hime to marry one of them. She gives each nobleman an impossible task to complete: The first was told to bring her the stone begging bowl of the Buddha from India, the second a jeweled branch from the mythical island of Horai, the third the legendary robe of the fire-rat of China, the fourth a colored jewel from a dragon's neck, and the final nobleman a cowry shell born of swallows. Whoever returns first, gets to marry her.

That's a very quick overview of the story, check out the much more interesting version here and here. There are multiple versions of the story. The ones linked are both good, but slightly different.

I had the idea of basing a series of artworks around the five tasks Kaguya-Hime gave to the noblemen and an extra of the moon for context.

When I start making any sort of artwork, I like to make quick collage experiments. Mainly to get an idea of scale, composition, colour, etc. Here are a few examples below.

I was pretty happy with how the moon design came out, so I decided to go ahead and start making the final artwork.

I made the decision to collage the moon and Mt. Fuji in the foreground, however, I didn't want a pitch-black background.

For the mountain, I liked that there was a bit of red peeking through on the sides, it reminds me of the red Australian outback. So I decided to go with a red theme with the mountain when I collaged it.

For the moon, I separated it into three layers - black, gray, and white. I cut out each layer and pasted them on top of each other.

For the background, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't want a flat black colour. So I experimented around using inks, acrylic paint, combining different colours and different brush strokes. I ended up using red and black ink, and splattering black randomly in the background to give it the sense of being in space, or looking up into space.

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