How to GYOTAKU Fish Print Traditional Japanese art

thanks for joining us on this episode on how to gyutaku a fish Veronica and I were invited to a workshop hosted by the Bay Area sport Fishers Club held at the San Jose Bass Pro Shops we filmed the whole event including how to get started some one-on-one commentary and how to add detail by painting the fish's eyes this lesson is taught by Bruce koike Bruce has been practicing gyotaku since 1985 and has printed over 150 species of aquatic animals including fish seaweed crab clams octopus and squid he does these workshops to teach others how to print their own fish his website will be linked Below in case you're interested in joining one of these classes with that said let's all learn together take it away Bruce my name is Bruce koiike I'm from Newport Oregon thank you for your interest in learning about fish printing which is a Japanese art form called gutaku gyutaku literally translates the fish rubbing and I think that'll be pretty plainly evident as you see this demonstration and how you're going to do the printing ready okay so one of the important first steps is to have your fish dry you're basically removing standing water you don't want your fish to be cold because what happens with your cold glass of beer it gets wet on the outside and what are we trying to do with paper towels remove standing water okay so you don't want a real cold fish so in drying the fish you're going to leave the paper towel stationary and run your hand over this is good practice you know start getting in touch with how that fish feels underneath the paper with your fingertips if you find places where there's water which is like around the eyes or the Nares just move the paper a little bit and retouch that area because they're pits the Nares and the lateral line are pits and water seeks the lowest point so there's water in there okay you can lift the Gill covering slip in a little paper towel pull and tap when you start don't just dive your brush completely into that pile of paint but do like that so you're still leaving quite a bit of unpainted brush there can get by with just the tip I brought dark colors which will show up readily and so think minimal as you paint the fish these are acrylic paints they dry fairly quickly what's nice in here is there's not a lot of air movement and so your paints aren't going to dry near as fast as if you're in a breezy area Okay one percent share an observation yeah you're going around the eyes don't paint on the eyes if you happen to get paint just take your finger a couple times you can remove it this is going to allow a really nice Landmark to put your eyes in you're not stroking if you stroke you'll see stroke marks and you know some fish have stripes but not necessarily textured yeah another observation there's certain areas that you're skipping like kind of like the eye but you're skipping like the pectoral fin also yeah so what you want to do with the pectoral fin is to leave a Halo around it so if you can imagine if you had um blue blue blue and then you have this something that's a different texture but it's the same color it's hard to really spot it so by leaving this little Halo it's going to be the color of your paper for you get back to the fin okay so a little Halo open area how frequently would you say I go back and get some more paint very very frequent what do you mean and I don't necessarily go back to where the pile is again think minimal if I if you keep going back to the pile you're just loading up that brush a lot okay we'll pull this fin out give it a stroke and then with your pectoral fin you do want to put paint on it and the way that you can do that and maintain that Halo is using the thin brush going in lifting it and painting it and then laying it back down in the open spot you're only going to paint the upper half of the fish okay you don't want to paint on the underside once you have that paint the fish fully painted then you're going to remove that sheet because you don't want that paint on your finished product okay we're going to use these pieces of foam board to support your fins and enable us to open those Fins Up for people to enjoy seeing and you don't necessarily have to stack these boards right on top of each other but you could stack and then leave one offset and that creates that ramp nice little angle that you could that's beneficial in all this we're going to use pins a lot of times people will use clay or other things to hold the fins in place but I like pins you don't necessarily have to go through the membrane but just at the edge of the spine and open up okay observation about the pins they're angled good and that just allows your paper to get closer to the surface fish now for the tail fin you'll use two pins hold it on the distal end and then pull it apart um don't pull apart very far or hard um because you'll tear tear the fin but just drive it into the newspaper and if there's areas that you find that did not have paint and this was pretty good then you can paint that that area and set it aside one more fin to pin up and these foam core pieces are you know various shape just try to put together the combination that fits best for the fish that you have okay and then we have Oddball shaped pieces these shaped pieces are going to place in the mouth of the fish so mouth opens up this way you don't have to put the board at the top end but put it on the bottom half where you're not gonna it won't interfere with the paper okay so we'll open it a little bit put it right on the table and that's going to hold that open hopefully okay the paper which is rice paper has a smooth side and a textured side doesn't matter which side you use try both sides see which one you like best [Applause] and when you when we do the rubbing it's a very light touch if you see the color of your fingernails change because you're pressing it turns pink you're pressing too hard so it's a very light touch so light that just the weight of the paper do you see some paint right here just from the weight of the paper so that's not very much pressure at all so we're going to start at the head we want to establish upper and lower jaws and then move back as you're working with your fish notice the shape and we want to capture the shape of the fish okay so I'm going to just open my hand that'll hold the paper in place more foreign so once we get close enough to where our pins are going to use your fingers and go down around the fish and place them at the base of the spines or the fins basically these fingers are going to hold those fins in place so you can remove the pins if you remove the pins without doing that the fins will lay down right so we're gonna hold pin down um the spines and then remove the pins so there's one there's two and then do the rubbing okay how many pins did we use in the tail two two so we're going to use two fingers hold the edge of the fin and remove the pins to the rubbing get to the anal pin move the PIN and we get to the pelvic fin which is on the ventral side I'm going to hook hook the fin with my hand pull it down a little bit my fingers be basically become the boards and then drop the paper down and do the rubbing supporting it from underneath right so I do one final glance on kind of the perimeter of the fish this as well as see if there's any open spots that didn't get touched I'm happy with it I'll remove it so you're going to grab the corners you're going to lift towards the ceiling and pull back but also rock it back and forth well this one came off really easy so you're doing this and pulling it off okay okay so that's how we do it everyone will get a point a point to where we're done Printing and then I'll do an eye demonstration pick a fish uh take it to your work station there should be paper towels start drying when it's dry to your satisfaction come get paint I'm not going to answer is this dry enough is this too much paint that's the whole part of the learning process after you're done with your first print let's do a one-on-one and then do more and I think the bin came up really well yeah in good direction following you see how that if you had just that blue like right here running all the way up to the blue if it's been how it would get lost the contrast yep yep cool what could be improved on this one well what would you like to improve in it I guess leaving maybe closing the gap on the Halo a bit more okay yeah they're they're narrowing it and you're in control of you know where the paint goes um so there should be a pelvic fin in here it was really tiny and I couldn't get it yeah so once you have it painted you're going to come in here hook that spine rotate your hand underneath basically become foam board that's okay that I'm going to rotate your wrist and the paper leave the paper back down and then rub with the other hand we'll start easy we'll do the standard fish so your basic components are the pupil which will always be black and in this case round if you're having that fish look somewhere then the shapes change up and I I like to rotate my paper and just keep kind of this motion so I'm not changing angles so it's just it's a very forgiving stage because if you screw up and make it too big or you have a a bulge on the black pupil you just let it dry and paint over it with white we go ahead and fill that up and just rotate it a little bit more to get the roundness the next part's the iris so that's the color on your driver's license is the iris that could be any color just realizing your black pupil if you use dark blue the contrast isn't necessarily there to highlight that so paint it the way the fish is paint it any color for me let's use up the paint that's on people's palettes okay so look around at what people have when you're painting the iris you want to leave just the smallest area between the pupil and your iris like 164th you know just the tiny piece so you can start a little ways away and paint in towards that so I'm rolling the brush to get excess paint off so you don't you don't do the eye painting when you're in a bad mood or after you've had multiple cups of coffee caffeinated coffee when I'm in if you want to say production mode I will have stockpiled eyeless fish prints and then you know set aside an evening where I'll do I'll start off by doing just pupils and just do pupils for that evening and then come in and do irises the next night but it because you spread it out it gives the opportunity for the paint to dry whereas we don't have that luxury so I'm just gonna blast through leaving a slight gap between the pupil and Iris yes tiny tiny Gap it's I don't know 132nd or 164th is Tiny so the outer perimeter of the iris will you'll leave a wider margin between the Outer Perimeter and the inside of the eye socket and you'll see in a little bit now this is the simplest eye you can embellish it um to any degree and you know using fish books fish ID books internet you can just see the variety of eyes that are are had now one of the things with this particular eye is I chose so I'm using just the brown but if you look at it the iris you see white in there so I'm choosing not to paint not to put down a solid layer of brown okay so it adds a second color just from that okay now look at your neighbor look at your neighbor's eye take your cap off please okay what do you see I see it really well on you you see something a little glitter a little reflection okay so we want to put that on the fish and because yeah yeah don't well you you two can look lonely a long time but be inappropriate for a lot of other people right keep looking okay back over here so we want to put that little white reflection on the pupil and it can be a DOT it can be a kidney bean shape where the ends are symmetrical it can be a comma or an apostrophe so it's asymmetrical it could be a pie wedge with the tip of the pie you know pointed towards the center of the eye so the pupil the key point is to leave just a really thin black strip between the white white reflection and the perimeter of the pupil okay so wash washer paint brush um before you do that so it's just kind of in your in your mind's eye remember what that looks like I whoa foreign so that's the little reflection spot [Music] so this is a yutaku set up by our vice president Jessica um we had this specialist come in who does this for a living and gave us a very private session and basically taught us from start to finish on how to do a print and gave us lots of printing time which was great the area is for Fishers were a public or a social fishing club we're all volunteers as far as board goes we take everyone in who wants to learn about fishing and try to educate them and teach them how to do it we hold Charter trips we do events out on surf fishing our website's www.bayareasportfishers.com you can find all our events there we have an educational page uh anything you want to learn about fishing we have there so awesome it was a good event thank you so much we had a great time I did learn quite a bit even if I've done this before and that's actually the reason I'm here is uh Steve saw that I've been trying to learn how to do gyotakus and he sent me a message oh yeah thanks stop stop but uh yeah really I did learn a lot from Bruce and what he was showing that card stocks would be Game Changer but there's a few other things that I can't even put into words that I was able to pick up and learn especially when it comes to detailing those eyes so that was really awesome so thank you for glad it was useful inviting me yeah I I'm glad I came but guys I hope you guys enjoyed this and you found it useful if you guys want to print your own fish hope this video helped you and I'm going to leave links below uh Bruce is going to give me his information on how to contact him how to purchase some of his prints and they will be in the description below we'll catch you guys on the next episode big shout out to Bruce thank you

Channel: Hook2Cook

Views: 8,846

Keywords: california fishing, fish printing, fish print, fish printing gyotaku, fish printing japanese, fish printing art, fish printmaking, gyotaku fish printing, gyotaku tutorial, gyotaku how to, gyotaku art, gyotaku printing, gyotaku octopus, gyotaku hawaii, gyotaku naoki, gyotaku tips, gyotaku lesson

Id: 5wtTQsye6Bw

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023