Create a scenic view of Mount Fuji rising from the shibazakura

flower fields and cherry blossom trees.

Japan’s Mount Fuji is an active volcano about 100 kilometres southwest of Tokyo. It is

located on the island of Honshū, it is the highest mountain in Japan, standing 3,776.24

metres tall. It is commonly known as ‘Fuji-san’ and has been a pilgrimage site for centuries.

It is considered one of Japan’s 3 sacred mountains, and summit hikes remain a popular

activity. It’s iconic profile is the subject of numerous works of art, notably Edo Period prints

by Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Near Lake Motosu, located at the base of Mount Fuji, there is an area where shibazakura

flowers grow. During the time when the first flowers bloom each year, the ‘Fuji Shibazakura

Festival’ is held. The view of Mount Fuji and shades of pink of the blooming shibazakura is

spectacular. There are six different varieties and more than around 800,000 shibazakura,

covering 2.4 hectares of land. Footbaths are provided at the venue during the festival

period so that visitors can relax and have a rest from their journey while enjoying the

magnificent view!

Have a go at creating a view of Mount Fuji surrounded by the cherry blossom and

shibazakura flowers:

My children and I had a go at this. First of all, take an A4 sized piece of paper , we placed

ours in the portrait position so we could centre Mount Fuji in the top middle part of the

paper and still get lots of flower fields at the bottom. You might like to experiment and try a

landscape view if you prefer, but consider your composition first.

We used a pencil to lightly plot our scene. Use the photos in this document as your

reference or have a look for your own in books or on the internet.

Next, we hunted through our recycling to look for old magazines and newspapers. We

collected suitable pictures/pages and coloured sections, concentrating on the following

colour palette: Teal greens, duck egg blues, whites and greys. A whole spectrum of pinks;

from baby pinks to vivid fuschias. We also found some purples and lilacs. We selected some

sky blues and lime greens too. To give you an idea of the colours we found you can see our

selection as we started to collage sections of our work below, with our ripped magazine

pages.

We ripped our coloured papers into smaller manageable sizes and started to collage them

onto our drawing with a glue stick. We started with the sky, carefully working around

Mount Fuji. Next we filled the different portions of flower fields. We collaged a path in one

solid colour to draw the eye up the page towards the volcano. Then we used the grey and

whites to fill in Mount Fuji before roughly filling in the tree foliage on our horizon.

When you are ripping and sticking, think about the shape in which you’re ripping and try

and make your shapes fit the certain areas you are using them to collage, straight rips for

the mountain edges, rougher rips for the tree leaves and so on. We tried to not leave too

many gaps! We also tried to work around our pencil marks.

When we had finished ours looked like this:

Do not worry if your paper has writing or images on, this will add to the interest in your

picture. We happened to find Easter and Spring flowers printed in the colours we needed,

which was really lucky and worked well with the theme. I think we managed to find snow

and rock images to rip for Mount Fuji and photos of green peas and other random

vegetation for the trees!! Have a look and see what you can find!

Next, we mixed up this palette of colours with some acrylics:

Then we used a flat edge brush to paint a little bit of white on Mount Fuji, we didn’t cover

the whole of it. After that we dipped a cocktail stick into a small amount of black to work in

some texture and detail on the volcano.

Next we used a normal brush to paint in some branches from each side of the page. Every

time we stopped a branch we split it off into two directions like a ‘V’ then these would each

have their own ‘V’ to continue. As we went further, our branches got thinner, we did this

by switching from a brush to a cocktail stick.

Once we had completed this, we used our fingers to dot some large blossom spots on top

of our branches. We gently dabbed, finger prints using pale pink colours to create an

impression of blossom in the sky like this, we also used white:

Then we printed further blossom dots using cotton buds instead of fingers and picked out

stronger coloured pinks:

After that, we created a similar impression in the flower fields:

Then we used the flat edge brush again to add some vertical marks of lime green for the

trees on the horizon, again we didn’t cover all our collaged paper, we just emphasized a few

areas, for interest.

Lastly, we added a few more blossom spots over the green and also where necessary

around the page to frame the Mount Fuji focus!

If you don’t have any paints, see if you can try something else? Felt tips, pens? Here I had a

go with oil pastels, using the mark making that you can see to the right of my picture, not

including the blossom dots and slim tree branches of course. The dots were created with a

very small circular motion and the tree branches with the fine edge of the pastel.

Of course,if you need to improvise with any of this please do, you may only have the

resources to draw branches and finger paint blossom on top for instance. Either way I’d

love to see any examples you create with this theme and using any of the techniques

here(or others) that you can. Have fun!