Falling for Hokusai

I've been working on some new stuff,  playing around with different media.  I've been inspired by a couple of classes, mainly a watercolor class I'm teaching this summer at SUNY/Rockland, which prompted me to throw out my old beaten up brushes and buy some new ones. Here is an illustration for a book series I'm working on, a quick sketch with watercolor with some Photoshop layers for the background.

And I just got a great little book, called Hokusai, First Manga Master which is about the famed Japanese ukiyo-e master artist of the late 18th C.  It features about 60 pages from the 15 volume Hokusai Manga in which the prolific and influential artist literally illustrated an encyclopedia of images initially for his students.  They were eventually used by many others, including Degas and Monet.