Channeling Hokusai

I have a print on my wall in my stamp room of a beautiful Hokusai painting called Shichirigahama in Sagami Province. You can see the original here. Mine is a hand-painted reproduction, so the blues are much deeper than in that link and it's really stunning. My dad got it in Japan.

The blue in this print, as well as in Hokusai's original woodblock prints is a perfect, true ultramarine, and the prints are largely dominated by blue, which is one of the many reasons I love them.

While the most famous of the Hokusai prints is The Wave (for short), it's also the most terrifying. The poor person in the little boat in that piece of art appears to be a sacrifice that the island demanded, in the words of my beloved Losties.

One person describes The Wave this way:

The drawing of the wave is a deification of the sea made by a painter who lived with the religious terror of the overwhelming ocean completely surrounding his country; He is impressed by the sudden fury of the ocean's leap toward the sky, by the deep blue of the inner side of the curve, by the splash of its claw-like crest as it sprays forth droplets.

TERROR is right. As a land-loving human, that's what I feel when I look at the painting, BUT, as a blue-loving human I also feel great joy, as long as said wave is contained in a safe, lovely woodblock print or in a book. I'm not gonna lie, though, it makes my chest tight just looking at it on Google Images.

When Effie asked me if I wanted to hop with The Ton for their new release, and I saw the images, I went STRAIGHT for her stunning wave image - I am so excited to be able to channel a little Hokusai on a card.

But, being the twisted person I am, I couldn't just make it blue.

I have just spent a week with the amazing people who came to my retreat and stayed after for shenanigans, and I truly have sore jaw muscles from laughing and smiling at their shenanigans. It was a fantastic weekend/week and I miss them all terribly.

What I can tell you is - there is no art without coffee. I should have taken a picture of all of the coffee forms at the retreat. There were about 36 cases of Keurig pods, TONS of High Brew Cold Brew, regular brewed coffee, and many emergency Starbucks runs.

What can I say? It inspired my card today. :)

InLinkz.com

It's true, you know.

The sentiment is from their Caffeine Crush stamp set and it cracks me up! #seewhatididthere

Now one of the many things I love about this stamp is that it's YUGE, so it can go off the side of a card panel or front. It's hard to see here, but mine is stamped on a 4 x 5.25" panel and that's glued to a card base.

So to stamp it off-edge, I used my Creative Corners (a goodie bag gift for everyone at the retreat), and lined the stamp up this way to do all the layering. The lid of my MISTI is over on the right hand side.

This stamp set has cues on the right and the left to allow you to get perfect alignment for the layers - it comes in three steps, with some additional images for spray and some sentiments, which I used on my second card, which is much more traditional. 

InLinkz.com

What a stunning image. So much fun. 

If you want to continue on and hop to all the bloggers participating today, you can win this pretty wave, or whatever you want! Details below!

Three $25 gift certificates to The Ton's shop will be given away to random commenters from the hop participant blogs.  To qualify, you must leave a comment on The Ton Blog Hop post. The comment period will close on Monday, June 12th at 11:59pm. Winners will be announced thereafter on The Ton’s blog. Gift certificates will only apply to The Ton Stamps, Dies, Ink and Gilding.​

1. The Ton
2. Laura Sterckx
3. Tae Eun Yoo
4. Laurel Beard
5. Mayline Jung
6. Svitlana Shayevich
7. Emily Midgett
8. Dana Gong
9. Vera Yates
10. Svetlana Pavlova
11. Eunji Jung
12. Amy Tsuruta
13. Laura Jane Head
14. Justine Hovey
15. Sveta Fotinia
16. Janette Kausen
17. Marika Rahtu
18. Jenny Lee Yamasaki
19. Amy Kolling
20. Lisa Harrolle
21. Lydia Fiedler
22. Brenda Noelke
23. Olga Matyushevskaya
24. Chris Dayton
25. Anna Kutsenko
26. Kay Miller

Loveyameanithavesomecoffeebye.