Some time ago, David Bull wrote up a detailed encyclopedia entry on using gold flakes on this print here: http://woodblock.com/encyclopedia/entries/012_11/012_11.html. Some things have changed since then; for example, you can now buy tubes of gold flakes. It's marketed as a food additive to make your meal look more luxurious! When Dave wrote the article, he had to make his own flakes out of sheets of gold leaf.

However, the tube the flakes came in didn't quite suit our needs, so they had to do things differently. Here's a view of Dave and Rei practicing with a hand-held strainer as the applicator.

And here is a closer look at the strainer itself.

After perfecting her technique, she got busy applying the gold flakes to her new batch of 'Red Dragonfly' prints.

Between working on each print, she needed a place to put down the strainer, so she used a plastic lid from something else in the workshop. With each use, the pile of gold flakes that had fallen out of the strainer grew and grew. It's not every day you can truthfully claim to have a pile of gold.

One of the most important things when using gold flakes is to make sure the air around you is still. As Dave put it in the encyclopedia article, "a sneeze would be disastrous." Unfortunately we're in the middle of a long heat wave here in Tokyo, and keeping the air still required keeping the air conditioner off. Needless to say, it was hot.

The thermometer reads about 36 degrees Celsius, which is just shy of 99 Fahrenheit for those of you in the US!

Everyone drank lots of water and we got a beautiful new batch of 'Red Dragonfly' prints finished!