yesterday (sunday) we went to shiragawa village. this old village is a world heritage site.
this village has 24 old wooden houses designed for warmth with thick straw roofs and a huge hearth on the middle of the living area.
in the museum there are houses that have artifacts mostly home tools that were used in thier old ways of living. some houses you can com inside for free some have a fee.
there was a small 7-10 feet drop of water from the creek that flows into a pond. this area was covered in snow and the pond was frozen so it was hard to tell if it was man-made or not.
when we entered the museum i saw a shed which was a watermill and i wasted no time drawing it even if it was snowing lightly. while drawing, i had to cover my notebook from the snow that fell from pine branches when the wind blew. but water and snow still fell on my sketchbook pages. thankfully the pages dried up after a few hours. it was so cold could only do scratchy drawings with my charcoal pencil.
walking around the museum village which was 80% covered in snow was a surreal experience. some of my companions could not take the cold and have to go warm themselves in the restaurant earlier than us.
at the restaurant the food would not be available for quite sometime so i had time to go back out and draw. i sketched the house on the other side of the road where only its roof and top windows were visible because the lower part was covered by a roadside wall of snow.
after drawing the house and part of fhe mountains in the background i turn around and saw the beautiful mountains that were covered in snow and looked silvery. it is exactly what it looked liked in traditional chinese and japanese paintings. before yesterday i originally thought that old sumi painters would use outlined strokes to show the mountain outlines artistically but now i know that when you see the mountains for real, the trees with bare branches are the ones that make up the mountain outlines which was so awesome for me that i got to see it!
after our lunch we went to the upper hill to view the village there was one old house that was isolated from the village and i would have painted it on android if there was enough time.
we went home shortly after and arrived back to our new hosts house after 3hours