Bookmarking Hiroshige

Bookmarking Hiroshige: Hakone and Yui

June 2018
Hiroshige Utagawa was a master of Japanese ukiyo-e prints in the 19th century. One of his most well-known works was Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road, a series of prints that depicted scenes along the route of the Tokaido highway. While ukiyo-e prints generally depicted women and kabuki actors, earlier in the Edo era, landscape scenes became the most prominent in the 19th century, marketed as inexpensive but distinctive souvenirs.

In translating the Hakone and Yui stations prints into a vertical form that could be used as a bookmark (another kind of inexpensive souvenir), I singled out portions of the original works that lent themselves the best to a vertical composition. In Hakone, that meant focusing on the travelers on the mountain path; in Yui, that meant taking elements from across the horizontal composition and squeezing them closer together. I kept my colors to simple flats and gradients to mimic the original prints, and layered textures over the results to disguise the digital nature of the painting.