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Bonkei project - the creativity of it
This happens to me sometimes. And it particularly happens when I am writing a story. It just writes itself. And this bonkei project just kind of wrote itself. It just popped and happened practically on it's own. If you haven't seen the video of how to make this project it is on my youtube channel here. |
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How this project happened is just part of that big mystery of creativity. One of my bonsai is quite overgrown. It needed some cleaning and trimming and soon I will have to wire it. I took it down and laid it on my work table.
The flat dish you see underneath it is a bit too big for the bonsai. But it works. It didn't come with the bonsai pot, somebody had given me the dish.
So while taking the pot off the dish I looked at it. Wow, big dish. It would be great for a bonkei project.
I had already heard of bonkei (the Japanese art of tray landscapes) but had never done one.. And just like that I decided to do one.
While I was trimming and cleaning the bonsai the whole bonkei project came to me. I saw a little island with some water, a cliff, a cave with glowing red eyes and a hero standing on the shore.
Just like a normal diorama this tray landscape was a moment frozen in time. That moment where an adventurer faces his fear and either takes a step toward that fear. Or he gets back in the boat and goes home.
I grabbed a sketch pad and did a few drawings.
From there it was all typical diorama making skills to bring it to life. And I had the added fun of making a miniature tree and sculpting a miniature hero. Sculpting miniatures is one of my favorite things to do.
But here is where the creativity continued on to another level.
The thought occurred to me that there was no way for our hero to get up the cliff to the cave. So I made and added a little grappling hook and added it to the scene.
But this brought up questions. Why was it already there?
Well, the answer and the story wrote itself. Other adventurers had left it. They scaled the cliff, faced the beast in the cave and never returned, leaving the grappling hook there.
Fun little kernel of a story. I ended up writing a whole story around that idea. And I made a youtube video for it. It just flowed. I wrote the whole story in one half hour without making any editing corrections at all. It was fun. And the darn project, diorama and story all wrote itself. (You can read the story as I wrote it without editing here)
Or you can listen to the story right here. Our hero now has a name. It is "Skor" and the story is called: "A Skor to Settle".
