'Ukiyo-e Heroes'

Print #11 - A Young Man Shakes Heaven


Title: A Young Man Shakes Heaven

Cartouche: "A youth commands the Heavens"

Comments from Jed: (Coming soon)

Comments from Dave: Although this print doesn't look all that 'busy' when compared to some of the others in our series, the carving was pretty stressful. Jed and I produced this print 'to order' for a company making a documentary film on our work (now titled: Art of the Game), and those people were on a very tight schedule. I was able to produce the key block at leisure, but they wanted to film the subsequent stages - preparing colour separations, doing all the colour block carving, and then the test printing - all within the space of a week or so while the US-based crew was here in Japan on a short trip. It wasn't enough time, and I will always regret that I gave in to their demands and worked to their schedule. This hasn't affected the final print, because once they left I picked up the work and finished things off properly, but the sample print that appears as the final scene in the film was very rushed and is not what it should have been.

But other than that, the print is very satisfying ... The mist out of which the creature rises is actually an illusion created by leaving areas of the paper untouched, and the foreground area is deepened and darkened with multiple overlays of different blocks, some created with 'scratch' carving, a technique we have not used in this series before ...

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