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Writer's pictureJason Fujiwara

Lake Chuzenji

This piece is from a hike we did at the end of autumn 2020, along the southern edge of Lake Chuzenji in Nikko, Japan.

I love the opportunity to get away from the big city and explore a part of Japan I've never had the pleasure of experiencing before. As always, I documented the journey with my trusty camera! Through the process of reimagining and recreating this snapshot of time, I hope to convey my feelings and moods at the time of capturing this image on the hike/ creating the collage/ writing this blog.


In this image, I really liked the ripples across the surface of the lake and how the colour of the water changed from a light green/blue to dark blues. So I tried to replicate the dark blue with an ink bleed along the edge of the lake and also using a super fine brush to paint the direction of the ripples. After I let that dry, I painted a very light shade of yellow. Using an eye-dropper immediately after, while it was still wet. I poured yellow ink over the top and let it bleed out. This created a really beautiful 'bleed' effect. And for fun, I decided to add extra blue blobs, which mixed with the yellow and became green!

At this stage of the collage, I really wasn't sure how this image was gonna work. To me, it looked more like a starry sky with galaxies than the surface of a lake.


Next, I planned to collage using yellow, orange and red for the main mountain and purple for the rest of the landscape. But as I was collating the coloured paper to use in the collage, I found an orange/ peach colour. This colour and the dark red I already had worked really well together, but the yellow didn't work at all. But pink did work!

I started collaging from the top using pink, and worked my way down to the base of the mountain using the orange/ peach colour and dark red at the bottom.


Lastly, all I had to do was layer different shades of purple, in the same topographical style I did in my last collage where a layer is glued down and the next is cut slightly smaller than the first and pasted over the top. repeat for as many layers as needed... Easy, right? Well, when I was cutting one of the purple layers I accidentally placed the paper facing the wrong way. So when I placed it down, it was backwards!

So, as you can see, I wanted the purple to sit between the pink and light purple layers. I ended up just pasting it down, showing the other side of the purple, which was just some text on white. Kinda boring. It didn't work as well as the purple, but I wanted to see how it would look.


Please enjoy the unadulterated final collage, below.


If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it on Facebook, or wherever you share cool things. And as always, thank you for reading!


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