How to Draw Japan

About this book

Every garden corner fails or succeeds on the same three questions: where does it stand, how was it made, and what single thing just happened there? This book teaches one transferable grammar — the Grammar of the Garden — on one hundred Japanese garden elements and plants, each drawn as a portrait in six steps: fix the plot, the ground line and the light and never let them wander; block in the great masses (canopy, stone, ground, pot, water); draw the growth and the making (the trunk's bend, the clip line, the stone's facets, the rake's furrows, the lashings); then, at Step 4 only, place the anchor event — one fallen leaf, one water drop, one cone, one ring of ripples, a lantern's first glow. Bonsai in every classic style, gate pines and weeping maples, triad stones and combed gravel seas, ponds, falls, crouching basins and bridges, stone lanterns, bamboo fences, gates and stepping stones: 100 subjects in 6 fully illustrated steps each, plus a guided practice page for every single one. No real garden or masterpiece bonsai is depicted; every subject is a generalised type, so the grammar transfers to any garden you will ever stand in.