Chigiri-e

I highly recommend the http://www.wetcanvas.com/ free artists' web site. There's over a hundred thousand members representing every art discipline that I am aware of and some of which I'm aware of only because I discovered them there.

I recently remembered a television series , shown many years ago, on Japanese artists who were considered national treasures. I loved the series and one artist expecially. He used torn bits of washi paper (colored Japanese paper) and applied them to plain wooden dolls achieving amazing transluent qualities. Paintings are also made using this technique. I wanted to know more but didn't have the faintest idea as to where to start a search. I posted the question on the wetcanvas web site and within a hour I had the answer with links to examples of the art and links to instructions. What a site!!

The art form is called Chigiri-e: literally meaning torn art. I'm attaching a link to a web site showing examples of the art: http://keisol.com/tomomiwashi/default.htm . I haven't received permission to show any artist's work and I don't know of any in the public domain so I'm just offering the web site. Hopefully someday I can produce some work worthy of showing.

Some may consider this to be collage but it's really not.