Announcing a new Drawing Challenge: Shinrin Yoku

Hi everybody,

Here is the theme for next weekend’s drawing challenge: Shinrin Yoku

Inspired by Chloe’s imminent adventure in Japan, Shinrin Yoku, translated as Forest Bathing, is something she expects to be doing a lot of. How about we look into it ourselves.

Let’s start with the art and just keep going all year.

Art: some fern stamps I cut the other day, “inked” with watercolour to make a shadowy print, and ink drawn ferns, coloured in with watercolours so that they shade and mix where they overlap, on a page in my small poetry journal. Found poem reads:

There are the dense pine jungles, protected by the spikes of dead branches, with never a bit of green to relieve the grey – the favourite haunt of spiders, who stretch out their webs and sit there, waiting for foolish flies.

Foliage growing darker and darker and more silent as the moss grew thicker and vines slung themselves more luxuriantly from tree to tree.

The most beautiful.