I was given the theme Spring.

When it comes to Ikebana, it is not just some flower arrangement, but it is “the art of Japanese flower arrangement, with formal display according to strict rules”.’

Before doing my final Ikebana, I researched more on the spring season in Japan as I wanted to know more about it first – like what are it’s features in the flowers that bloom? what kind of flowers are they? when do they take place during the seaon?

I didn’t want to just know what an “ikebana” is, I wanted to know how to make a good one by incorporating the different features of the each blossoming flowers in Japan and what’s so special about different ikebana styles, hence researching on what I had to. The picture below are my initial ideas i came up with on the day we were given the Ikebana task.

The picture above are the kinds of flowers that bloom during the Spring season in Japan. Notice that I did not include any other bright colours such as yellow (which also blossom during Spring there) as I wanted to focus on these colours for my flowers in Ikebana. And also looking at some of the plants that simply fall elegantly with flowers clinging onto them – that’s one of my inspiration when making one of my Ikebana works.

So I wrote all of what I know down on my sketchbook.

From there I went on to see the kinds of ikebana style i wanted to make. So i searched up a few and these few caught my attention.

I was also interested in some other artist works such as Andy Goldsworthy and Jordyn Miley. This is because it shows the amount of patience they had to make unique sculptures out of branches and twigs and basically nature, without destroying much of their initial stage, which is what I am trying to do when making my ikebana.

For Goldsworthy, it’s because he made use of nature ONLY without destroying the aspect of it to create such an interesting sculpture, a land art. He would work with nature alone and not use other materials to say for example, stick them together to make a sculpture. An example would be the one below.

For Jordyn Miley, she does abstract nature weaving like the one below.

So the rough ideas I got from these was that, hmm maybe try weaving branches or twigs together to make a sphere? Since we still needed to incorporate spheres, cylinders and cones. And that itself could be my dominant, while the little flowers could be my double SO(s). And what if i also used pebbles instead?

I got alot of inspiration from all these and there was so many “what ifs” so I thought why not try making 1 first and see how it goes then maybe make another.

These are my final outcome ideas:

Stay close for the upcoming post where I will share my final Ikebana work (or should say “works”)! TEEHEE.