The Art of Haiku

Hello, while we wait for the (surprise) July 20th Kawaii face, let's discuss the ancient, beautiful Japanese poetry form of Haiku (俳句). Many of you probably covered this in Language Arts class during school. Traditionally, haiku (hi-coo) were about the beauty of nature and followed a syllable structure of 3 lines, with the first and last lines being 5 syllables, and the middle one being 7. In total, your whole haiku would have 17 syllables. When said aloud, they're quick but stunning.

So you know how I read Noah Scalin's book "Unstuck"... well one of the yearly projects that inspired me was Jennifer Willis' haiku-a-day. You can see them here: http://jennifer-willis.com/topics/365-haiku/

J    J    J

Being a dreamy, artistic and poetic person, I felt inspired by this so I started writing haiku of my own, late at night in bed while my husband slept. And then I wrote one to tell the story of how I got here, doing a daily blog/one-year project. Here it is:

Kawaii project

took me by surprise one day

coloring with Rob;

My husband said 'Hey,

you like adult coloring,

there is an event.'

To the event then,

where there was a draw to win

Noah Scalin's book

'Unstuck', inspired me

with all of the bold artists

projects every day.

See, 4 of them stacked like paragraphs tell a story. What kinds of haikus can you come up with?

Now before I go back to doing some housework and making today's Kawaii365 project, I'd like to leave you with a colored in version of the sheet from yesterday. How will you color yours?