History Day Project Analysis

For my History Day project, I chose the topic of Japanese (Nikei) in the Pacific Northwest. The topic was on Washington State’s History Day site and it piqued my interest. I’m very interested in Japanese culture and am planning on taking Japanese in high school. I’m hoping to be able to be a part of the exchange student program and go to Japan for 2 weeks or a school year. I believe it would be an interesting experience as Japanese culture is so different from American culture. I conducted my research first by doing general google searches and reading articles on the internet. After getting basic information from the internet, I started looking for primary sources from local universities and libraries, specifically Seattle Public Library

I’ve been drawing and painting for a long time and I really enjoy it so this was a major influence to pick the category of exhibit. I also really enjoy the satisfaction of creating something and then seeing the end product. The creation of my project was a fairly simple one. I first spray painted the exhibit with an off-white shade to take away the severity of the white. After that was dry, I did the border of the board, using big, messy strokes to make a texture similar to that of a wood’s grain. After the painting of the board, I started painting the title board. I painted the title board blue first then sponged on white to give the appearance of a sky with clouds. I then sketched out the tree branches with a pencil before painting over the pencil with brown acrylic paint with a detail paintbrush. After the branches had dried, I began on the cherry blossoms. Using stippling motions and a stiff brush, I painted on the cherry blossoms with a medium pink acrylic paint. After the medium pink, I used a dark pink and light pink acrylic paint to give variance and more visual interest to the blossoms. Taking regular printer paper and brown acrylic paint, I used broad, vertical strokes to make a wood texture for the background of my title. For the Japanese on my board, I used gold and brown acrylic paint to write it. The Japanese says “soda” (ソーダ), “flowers” (ほな), and “vegetables”