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Here's a close-up of the print. The overall balance isn't quite right yet - the dragon himself needs to be more 'dirty', his outlines need to be darker, some of the edge gradations need to be cut back and softened a bit, and the gold-coloured spots on his skin need to be brought out more, but we're within striking distance ...

So, with now only two days left before the exhibition, I don't have a chance to make too many copies of this one just yet (9 people have sent in pre-release orders, and they've been waiting so patiently!), but I'll get a small pile of paper wet tonight, and see if I can get a small batch done before the weekend ...

Then, it'll be time to get them put into the Mokuhankan catalogue!

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And here's a zoom-in on one of the poet's names (scale lines are millimeters):

Not long to go on this print now ... just a couple of colour blocks ...

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I'm thinking that I'll probably need three pieces of wood (six faces) for this print; there aren't a lot of colours in it. Here are four of the kyogo impressions, with the yellow and red marks on them indicating areas that I'll be preserving (or cutting away). The third one from the left appears reversed, because it has already been pasted down onto a fresh piece of wood.

Here are a couple of close-up shots of the next block being carved. This will be the one that prints the metal powder (for highlights on the dragon's body, and the poem). I've already done the rough clearing, leaving just the areas containing the design elements.

And here are some of the zillion little dots of those highlights. It doesn't really matter what shape each one is, as long as they are approximately the correct size, but I like to kind of get them to look as close to the original as possible. You can see here that they are mostly carved quickly, into a sort of triangular shape. Later, after the first proof sheets show the appearance, I'll return to this block and knock off some of the sharper points, to give the dots a more rounded appearance ...

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Not much to see at that scale, so let's move closer ...

... and closer ...

On the first of those images, you can perhaps see the kento (registration marks) over at the right side, and at the bottom right corner. I've also marked lightly the outline that shows the actual size of the finished print. This one is a 'bleed' design, and will be printed on paper slightly larger, then trimmed down after printing.

Although I included the poem area in that image, it will not be carved on the same piece of wood as the keyblock, for a couple of reasons. One is that it will be printed at a different time - the key will come first, but the poem can't be printed until the very last step, after the thick black has been done. But also, I will be carving the poem on a different type of wood. The keyblock will be the usual cherry, but the poem will be on boxwood, allowing much finer detail (and much more pleasure in the carving!)

This is such a treat! Right here on my own desk, I can get this thing printed out by my little Canon laser, and the detail is perfect!

I tell you, one day these modern tools/robots are going to make even my old-fashioned job completely redundant, but until they do, I don't see any reason why not to make use of them!

Here's the printout, with the nice hard piece of cherry just waiting for it to be pasted down.

And it at this point that we leave my upstairs computerized room, and head down into the workshop. Here is where we leave all the modern stuff behind ... the photography, the pen tablet tracing, the Photoshop ... Once this sheet is pasted down onto the block, it'll be just me and my knife!

While the carving is under way, perhaps starting in a couple of days, I'll be thinking about how many colour blocks will be necessary. Here's a portion of the image; how many blocks do you think it will take?

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The poem on this print is going to be very difficult to reproduce ...

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Continued from Hokkei Dragon (1)

The poem on this print is going to be very difficult to reproduce - it is printed in a light silvery coloured powder over black, but as the silver has oxidized and blackened over the years, it is far from clear.

Here's what I'm faced with (The area here is just around 15mm high in the finished print):

(Some images can be clicked to popup a larger version)

Photoshop to the rescue! After some experimentation with brightness and contrast, we can make it jump out much more clearly:

I then proceed to carefully trace over the characters ...

... and once the background is erased, I'm left with a good sharp outline of the poetry.

If you compare carefully my version with the silvery original, you might feel that my characters appear to be a bit on the 'thin' side. There are two factors in play here. There is a fair bit of tamari on the original. Tamari is the slight 'fringe' of unwanted pigment that sometimes surrounds a printed area in a woodblock print. If too much pigment/paste is used when printing, tamari will show as unsightly blobs around the lines. In this case, it is very slight indeed, but is present here and there. I of course try and avoid including these areas in my tracing. I'll have my own problem with tamari at printing time, and don't need to include it now!

But a second reason for the 'slimness' of my characters is that when you carve this kind of block, you don't carve 'what you see', you carve a block that will print 'what you see'.

What I mean is that as there is almost inevitably a slight expansion in the wood when the wet pigment is applied at printing time, it is better to cut slightly on the slim side. At this tracing stage, it's impossible to foresee exactly how much expansion will occur, but my experience tells me that this level of slimming is about right for the wood I expect to be using.

Another problem with this job is that the original print has been trimmed a bit too aggresively, and the top section of three of the characters is missing. Now I've gradually been getting a bit more skilled at reading Japanese, but as for writing, and in a two-hundred year old style ... no way!

But I am very familiar with the style of this calligraphy, having made reproductions of a number of surimono from this era, most of which have calligraphy that was probably drawn by the same specialist. So to get close, I looked up the characters in a 'Dictionary of Old Writing Styles' that I have here, scanned them into Photoshop, and then used those as a guide for rebuilding the missing portions of the poem.

Here's part of the relevant page from the dictionary, and then the trimmed print on the left, and my 'reconstruction' on the right:

And in a great stroke of luck this afternoon, just as I was partway through this job, there was a knock on the front door ... and it turned out to be one of my former collectors who lives in the area, calligraphy teacher Kaneko-san, out for a Sunday afternoon walk!

I dragged her into the computer room and got her advice/assistance on finishing off the job. And it's good I did, because although she praised my work on the missing poem sections, when I had tried to reconstruct the hidden part of the seal at the lower left of the design, I had completely misunderstood the characters, and had botched it completely. She set me straight, and I think now we will have a print that will 'fool' even the men who wrote the poems!

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This series of posts will track the 'construction' of this print, start to finish ...

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This series of posts will track the 'construction' of this print, start to finish ...

There will be delays at times because lots of work on other projects is going on at the same time, but eventually, there will be a sequence of photos here that should cover the process pretty thoroughly.

Here's where we start - with a high resolution scan (600 dpi) of the original print.

(Some images can be clicked to popup a larger version)

A scan of this print at that resolution gives a file of around 168Mb. I use Photoshop for the tracing process, and open the image into a background layer of a .psd file. The resolution of 600 dpi results in an enlargement to the level shown in the next photo when viewed at 'Actual pixel size' on my monitor; enough to catch all the detail in the original.

I'm using a Wacom tablet for input, as a mouse just doesn't 'cut it' for extended sessions of drawing on the screen. This tablet has excellent pressure sensitivity, and with a single setting of the Photoshop brush size, lines can vary from quite fat, right down to a hair's breadth. Here's the setup:

At this point I haven't quite decided the actual procedure to use in making this print. There are two basic ways to go:

1. Use the same procedure as was used when making the original: cut the key block first, then use printed impressions from that to make the 'colour' separations.
2. Make the full set of colour separations by tracing from the original.

But in either case, it will be necessary to trace all the details of the block that will become the keyblock. In the case of this design, that block contains the outlines of the dragon body, along with most of the little marks and 'jots' giving texture to the skin.

The next three images show the procedure (using the area of the upper claw). The first image is the original:

The next image is the same thing, but with the addition of my tracing (on a separate Photoshop layer). I'm ignoring everything that is not part of this block (you can see the scattered dots that are actually printed from a separate block, with metallic pigment).

Here's the same area, with the base image now hidden. This is how I will print out the tracing for cutting the key block:

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