A whole city caught without a decent coat
The bridge is doing its job. The weather has decided to make that job unpleasant. In Utagawa Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, people bend beneath umbrellas and coverings while a boatman works on the river beyond. A broad crossing becomes a narrow strip of human urgency. You can look at the picture from a perfectly dry room and still feel that somebody should have checked the sky before setting out.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates this print to 1857 and places it in the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The medium is woodblock printing, with ink and colour on paper. Edo is the city now called Tokyo. This is a designed, printed image of a place, not evidence that Hiroshige stood on this particular bridge and finished this sheet during a shower. That distinction leaves its lesson for a sketchbook entirely intact.
Nor did a colour woodblock print spring from one person’s pen fully formed. The University of Missouri’s museum explains the usual collaboration between designer, block carver, printer and publisher. The atmosphere we admire depends on skilled making as well as an arresting design. Calling the picture a quick rainy sketch would overlook rather a lot of work.
First find what is staying put
Before counting the rain lines, follow the bridge. Its deck rises across the lower part of the image, making a long, pale diagonal against the river. The rails echo that direction. Underneath, dark uprights and braces give the crossing weight. This is the stable arrangement through which the weather moves. If everything in a drawing wriggles equally, there is nothing against which to feel the disturbance.
Now compare the distant bank. It reads as a relatively subdued band, with buildings and trees gathered into a larger mass. It does not insist on having every roof explained. Between that bank and the bridge lies a generous stretch of water. The open interval matters: it separates near from far and gives the rain room to be seen.
For a drawing of your own, choose one strong built edge before beginning the weather. A canopy, kerb, roof or railway platform may do. Establish its direction and one neighbouring gap. You are giving the page something dependable. It need not be ruler-straight; it needs to make sense in relation to what surrounds it.
Three jobs for the marks
The accompanying diagram separates three decisions for an exercise: the main built shape, the dark masses, and the direction of the weather. It is an invented street arrangement, not a tracing or a reconstruction of Hiroshige’s printing blocks. The point is to stop one kind of mark doing every job at once.
In the print, the thin sloping rain lines cross the broader structure of the bridge and water. Their repeated direction is legible before any individual line becomes important. The larger dark passages at the top and beneath the crossing do something different: they hold areas together. The small figures and their coverings provide another rhythm, interrupted by spaces along the deck.
Try describing those differences aloud: long built edge; broad dark; short human interruption; fine weather line. That is already a more useful plan than “put in all the detail”. The latter is not a plan so much as a way of missing lunch.
People make the weather believable
Look at the different ways the figures occupy the bridge. Some bunch together; others have a gap around them. Umbrellas and coverings change their silhouettes, and the visible legs suggest different phases of walking. The people are small, but they are not merely evenly spaced tokens proving that the bridge is large.
This offers a good question on location: what has the weather made people do? Watch a shoulder lift, a bag move under a coat, or a pause beneath a shopfront. Draw the outer action before adding a face. A tilted torso and the interval between two feet can carry more information than an ambitious expression placed on a body with nowhere to stand.
Do not invent a dramatic struggle just because your page needs one. If everyone is waiting calmly under shelter, draw the waiting. Weather may be most visible in a group’s changed position, in the unused outside chairs, or in the route people choose across a square. A truthful ordinary response has plenty to offer.
A wash is not a woodblock
The print’s colour is laid down through a different process from your watercolour wash. Borrowing its organisation does not mean pretending the materials behave identically. The V&A describes ukiyo-e as prints made in large numbers for a wide audience; their subjects included the everyday world as well as theatre, stories and landscapes. This sheet belongs to that print culture. Our small exercise is a conversation with its visible decisions, not an attempt to impersonate its makers.
With watercolour, begin by testing a light wash and a darker mixture on a spare corner of the same paper. Use familiar colours. A blue-grey and a warmer earth colour are enough for the exercise, but a single colour works too. Preserve a pale shape for the pavement or another important light. Let the wash settle before deciding which edge needs a second, darker statement.
If you use pen over the wash, wait until the paper is dry and test that pen first. Add a small family of weather marks in a consistent direction, then stop and look. A few purposeful lines may say more than a curtain of scratches across every person and window. Alternatively, leave out the rain strokes and describe the altered values, silhouettes and reflections instead. Drawing rain is not compulsory when drawing a rainy day.
The view you have is enough
Choose an accessible, sheltered view: through your own window, from a covered seat where stopping is permitted, or after the shower has passed. A print of a storm is not an instruction to stand in one. A dry pavement is also suitable for the exercise if you study the structure from life and label any imagined weather separately.
Make your first thumbnail very small. Ask whether its main diagonal, light area and darkest mass are clear when you hold the page at arm’s length. If they are not, simplify before enlarging. More windows will not settle an argument between the biggest shapes.
When the finished study feels busy, resist rescuing every corner. Find the mark doing the least useful work and omit that kind next time. The practical lesson here is not that every city should resemble nineteenth-century Edo. It is that a place, some people and a particular condition can be made legible through different, carefully chosen marks. Your bus shelter can manage that. It need not apply for a famous-view certificate.
Your turn · 25 minutes
Take it to the page.
- Aim and limits — make one readable account of structure, weather and human action. Allow 25 minutes, one pen or pencil, no more than two colours, two thumbnails and one postcard-sized study. Work from a sheltered, permitted viewpoint; never block a route.
- Minutes 0–4 — observe without drawing for one minute. Note one fixed edge, the largest light shape and something people actually do. Make two tiny compositions with different crops. Choose the one with the clearest gap between near and far.
- Minutes 4–10 — draw the main built shape and place one or two observed figures or objects. Use gaps and silhouettes. Omit window counts, brick patterns and facial detail.
- Minutes 10–18 — place a light wash and a limited dark mass, keeping the chosen light area clear. If the wash is still wet, use the remaining time to observe and write rather than forcing the next layer.
- Minutes 18–23 — when the paper is dry, choose whether directional rain marks add useful information. Try a few, then reassess. A pencil-only version can use a light tone and a darker tone instead of paint.
- Minutes 23–25 — add place, date and one observed change in behaviour or light. Label a study of the print as a study after Hiroshige; identify any imagined rain or later additions. Finish with two thumbnails, one small study and a sentence about the next experiment.
Look back: At arm’s length, can you distinguish the fixed structure, the main dark and the human action? Which marks describe the weather rather than merely filling the paper? What did you observe directly, and what did you add later? Which single kind of mark would you use less next time?
Sources & further looking
- Utagawa Hiroshige: Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake ↗
- University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology: Experiencing Landscapes in Japanese Prints, especially pages 1–2 ↗
- Victoria and Albert Museum: Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) ↗
- The Met: public-domain image and data policy ↗
Close-looking observations and practical exercises are this publication’s interpretation. Illustration credits are shown beside each work.
