I took my inspiration from the Cherry Blossom because I wanted to do something that is Oriental and special to Asia, thus the cherry blossom was one of the first thing that came to my mind. At the same time, I also thought about calligraphic painting of cherry blossom because it is an art that is very special to Asian countries and East Asian countries specifically.
Fig. 1, 2: cherry blossom calligraphic painting
Fig. 3, 4, 5, 6: Cherry blossom examples
I wanted to make a scarf, because to me scarves are fashion items that are very versatile. They can be folded, stretched out or hang over the body. Unlike other fashion item, scarves to not need to have a form to fit the body, hence it is a perfect rectangular canvas for decoration and creativity. For the final product, I want to make a scarf that mimics the calligraphic painting of cherry blossom tree and flower, thus I wanted to make the tree using calligraphic painting strokes and flower from resin droplets, because cherry blossom flowers are usually painted using dots made by the tip of the brush in calligraphic painting.
Fig.7: Concept for final product
I started out with making the resin flower petal first because it took time to cure. Documentation of the process can be view in my Resin journal:
While waiting for the resin to cure, I started working on the painting. I bought Shandong fanse white silk from Brighton in Chinatown and cut it into halves to prepare the canvas. Also, I cut out a small piece to first try out some testing. I used black acrylic ink from Daler Rowney because it doesn’t bleed and is waterproof once dry, thus it is my favourite brand.
Fig. 8: Bamboo calligraphic painting style for warm up
When working on the big piece, I made sure to have at least 3 layers of towel paper underneath to prevent staining on the table, and luckily it did not. I worked on this piece using only 1 big brush, and kept switching back and forth between the 2 trees to allow the ink to dry before applying more.
Fig. 9, 10, 11, 12: Cherry blossom tree painting – finish product and hang to dry
Once the resin petals were completely cured overnight, I used hot glue to slowly glue them on the branches. Each flower consisted of 5 big petals and 1 small bud. For some other parts, in order to replicate the budding flower, I used those petals that looked like water droplet or trimmed down the big petals to create the bud shape. It took 2 batches of resin to fill up all the branches with flowers.
Fig. 13, 14, 15: Flower arrangement on the scarf
Fig. 16, 17, 18: Close – up of the flowers
Product photo shoot of the scarf was done with the help of my friend Hiroko as the model
Fig. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 : Cherry blossom scarf – final product photo
Fig. 27, 28, 29, 30, 31: End of Semester show exhibition
Fig. 32, 33: Cherry blossom scarf together with 4 other scarves using a variety of techniques