Painting a Traditional Japanese Basket

Itaewon Global Village Center hosted a special foreigner art class which I could squeeze into my schedule .... making a traditional Japanese basket.

I love traditional handicrafts and putting these baskets together and transforming them into miniature works was art was great. Surprisingly the method is quite simple, but I say that now when we modern people can easily go to the store and buy our supplies and not be dependent on labor-intensive production of said materials. 

First of all, take a simple, light-weight wicker basket. Each of us had a 14" by about 4" deep cheapie basket, a small stack of index-card-size rice paper rectangles, a bottle of glue, and two flat paintbrushes (one for the glue and the other to use as a dry-brush to press down on the glued rice paper). So we all started out by glueing one side of a piece of rice paper and then tacking it down on the wicker basket frame. The idea is to cover the basket, including the top edge, entirely with two layers of rice paper or until the basket is no longer seen through the thin rice paper.

Then we could choose from a variety of decorative rice papers -- the teacher provided both Japanese-style rice paper and Korean-style rice paper for decorating. The two biggest differences between the two papers are that Korean rice paper is much more delicate and, though strong, is so fibrous that it can be torn into shapes with fibrous decorative edges; Japanese rice paper is thicker, tougher and harder to manage delicately shaped tears. That said, Japanese rice paper can be easily cut into shapes; Korean rice-paper doesn't allow easy cutting into the delicate shapes as the paper is thin and crawls around the scissors. The other big difference is the type of design employed on the papers. Japanese rice paper has tiny delicate designs and very vivid and bright colors (see picture immediately below) while Korean rice paper can be bright, or muted, have large designs or small. Since this is a traditional Japanese craft, I chose Japanese rice paper to give my basket a more authentic traditional look.

The ladies at my table were keen on cutting and designing some very unique baskets.

my dragonfly decorated basket (before the stain)

Once the baskets were decorated, we used a blow-dryer to make sure the glue was dry before applying the two layers of natural persimmon dye. I shouldn't have applied the third layer of persimmon dye -- the dark color competes with the red in the dragonflies. But anyway, it turned out very cool looking and we did everything under learning circumstances in 2 1/2 hours.

my traditional Japanaese basket and a dish of sprouts at a Vietnamese restaurant ... must be "Asian Day"

Some of the things I love most: watercolors, Asian calligraphy inks and brushes, and hanji craft!

Without the reflection, the dragonfly dance is rather cool.