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• this is the start; the framework is now in place. There are only a few dozen prints in there so far, but many many more will follow over the next couple of months.
• please note that these items are not for sale; these prints will stay in the Mokuhankan collection.
• the main thrust of the site will be the images. This is not a ‘research’ site where you will learn details of which kabuki play was performed on what date, etc. etc. It’s all about the beautiful prints!
• none of the images are scanned; everything is photographed, at very high resolution.
• some items have video links, some (one to start) will have audio (sit down together with me, and I’ll tell you why this print is so special! :-)
• the entire thing is completely 'responsive', and should work on any device from small phone up to super wide-screen desktop.

Although our printers and carvers have kept busy, some of the staff members who took care of the shop have had their work hours greatly reduced recently. Two of these members have now been ‘re-hired’ and have begun to work through the collection, adding items to the database and preparing images. This kind of expense doesn’t generate any direct sales revenue for us, so how can we afford to do this? Simple! These are Patreon funds directly at work ... thank you again to everybody who is supporting us through that platform!

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As you can see, the number of people who have subscribed to our YouTube channel is going to 'roll over' to a milestone number sometime in the next few days ... 100,000! Wøøt!

I was quite late coming to YouTube, putting the first video up in January of 2011. Six years later - by mid 2017 - we had slowly climbed to about 14,000 subscribers. But on the evening of June 24, 2017 something changed inside the YouTube algorithm, and instead of 20~30 people a day watching our videos, the figure suddenly jumped to more than 10,000 per day, and it has stayed consistently high since then. I haven't looked back since, and YouTube has become a very important part of our work here at Mokuhankan.

Some of the numbers are difficult to comprehend - more than a million and a half people have now watched the 'Remembering a Carver' video:

… and when I sit down to make a new one these days, I try not to think too much about that when pressing the red 'record' button. Talk about stage fright!

Thank you very much to all of you who have watched some of them, and I'll keep working hard to try and keep good ones coming!

(And I can't wait to get my silver Play Button! Maybe we’ll make an Unboxing Video for it! :-)

'Shrink' back down ...

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page | Comments [1]

I'm starting by spreading some pigment onto a white tile, instead of directly onto the wood surface:

And I then pick it up from there with the brush:

There are a few reasons for doing it this way:

• the white surface clearly lets me see the density of my pigment mix, something difficult to ascertain on the wood
• I can easily control just how much of the mix to 'dab' up with the brush. I carefully study each completed impression as it comes off the block, and can add more or less pigment on the next sheet, based on what I see ...
• this avoids having pigment build up on any particular part of the wood surface, something that can cause 'balance' problems in the impression. (That can also be avoided by varying the location of the place you dab the pigment when you are placing it directly on the block ...)
• by taking a few swirls over the tile before moving to the wood, the pigment gets well mixed in the brush, allowing me to do less rubbing on the wood itself, thus helping - in a small way - to reduce wear and tear on the carved lines ...

The brushing then proceeds as usual:

Always remembering to finish off with light 'sweeping' in the most delicate areas (hairlines, etc. etc.). This helps 'pull' pigment away from between fine lines. If you can hear the sound of the brush on the wood at this point, you are rubbing too heavily!

And you have to move quickly - if you take too long at this stage, things will be drying out over the rest of the wood, and you'll end up with an uneven impression.

Your paper should of course be ready in exactly the proper position for instant retrieval; again, every second counts.

In place, and down she goes. The particular act you are seeing in this photo - getting the paper exactly in the corner, is the single most critical act in the entire process of making a traditional Japanese print.

If you get it even the slightest bit out of the corner here on the key block, nothing can save you during the rest of the process. If each of your key block impressions is different in this respect - and on a print like this we are talking about extreme sub-millimetre accuracy - all subsequent colours will be mis-registered, but you will have no way to know where the error is.

In our workshop - and in any serious Japanese printing workshop - a printer who is working on a key block is never to be disturbed. No chatting; no phone calls; no nothing. Leave them alone!

The impression is then taken in the usual way - start with a few very light touches to get the paper 'down', then make the initial strokes in such a direction as to make the sure the paper is not being pulled 'out' of the registration marks. This is why it is more difficult for lefties to do this job - and why in the professional field here, there are no left-handed printers.

Right-handed printers mostly 'pull' their baren strokes, which helps lodge the paper into the marks while also applying good pressure; lefties have to 'push' their strokes to achieve the same effect, which is much more difficult to control. (Of course a left-handed - independent - printmaker could cut the marks on the opposite side of the block, but such a block could not then be printed by others ...)

I'm taking a peek here at the result - before lifting the paper off (holding it in place firmly with the baren). This lets me do her face carefully ... keeping the impression very light, taking a peek to see if the hair is OK, and if not yet quite 'ready', letting the paper back down and making a few more light passes ...

If it is OK, then off it comes ...

... and it then goes quickly into the out-stack (you saw the location of this in the previous post). It is sometimes common for the paper to dry out somewhat while doing the key block impressions - they tend to take a bit more time than many colour impressions, and they definitely do not add much moisture to the paper (unlike the background colour printing, for example).

So once I was finished the stack, I got my water brush out and went through the stack again, lightly re-touching the water level. The paper was then wrapped up, to wait until the next day before beginning any colour printing.

'Shrink' back down ...

Tons of prints are leaving here today!

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Here is our shop space this morning ...

But wait ... haven't I already posted that photo?

It's similar ... but not the same one. For one thing, it's a lot warmer here now, and I don't need that little 'puffy' anymore!

But if you look at the floor, you will see that things are very different. Instead of prints sitting in the shop racks, waiting for customers to come and browse ...

... we're packing!

Our Ome shipping center is still up and running, and those ladies are doing all the processing/packing/shipping of the subscription prints. But because the Japanese Post Office has stopped accepting all shipments bound for the US, we are using the Asakusa shop as a 'staging post', getting everything assembled there, and sending the prints in 'bulk' over to the US side via FedEx boxes. (Hi Jed-san! ... and thank you for helping like this!)

From there, they are dropped into the US Postal system for final delivery to the collectors. It is all a lot more expensive for us, but given the current situation, it seems to be the only way to get things to where they need to go.

We are in the process of trying to setup something similar for the EU, but it's a bit more complex because of import issues over there. (And post for quite a few countries - Germany, France, Netherlands, U.K., Canada ... is still being accepted by the Post Office here.)

Thank you to everybody who has been patiently waiting for their prints to arrive ... We are doing what we can to find a way through all these barriers!

'Shrink' back down ...

A very interesting old photo ...

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Look at this astonishing photo!

The photo came to me from Wikipedia, and purports to have been taken in 1910, in the woodblock printing workroom for the company that published the art magazine Kokka.

I learned about the existence of this photo today from one of the commenters on the newest YouTube video. For those who aren't familiar with it, the magazine Kokka has been published off and on since the Meiji era, and in its early days included woodblock prints in each issue. This was in the time before easy colour printing by offset presses, so in order to illustrate the old art that was the topic of the magazine articles, woodblock print reproductions were used to show the readers what the original items looked like. Because it was a popular magazine, they thus needed a lot of woodblock prints!

I have quite a few of the prints from old Kokka issues here in my collection, and the quality is sometimes nothing short of unbelievable. How on earth did they actually work to such fine tolerances? ... how did they carve so finely? ... It has all just seemed a bit unreal. But as you can see from this photo, it was basically pretty simple - just teams and teams of very highly skilled craftsmen, beavering away at their work day after day ...

We can glean so much from this photo ...

• None of the printers are using the maru-bake brushes (the ones similar to shoe-brushes in shape) that every printer uses these days. Every single brush visible in this photo is of the hanga-bake type (with the 'vertical' handle, and the hair in a single clump).
• There is no artificial light at all; in winter, work in this room must have ended pretty early every afternoon ...
• How on earth did these guys get in and out of their workstations?
• The strings across the roof show that this room must also have been used for drying paper after the sizing process. Perhaps they all did such work together? It seems impossible that sizing and hanging could co-exist with printing ...
• The stacks of prints being made are not protected in any way from drying out; is this really moistened paper?
• Every single piece of wood visible is perfectly flat and straight - presumably freshly carved for the current month's magazine. Once printing was done ... what happened to them? Tossed out, I suppose ... Some of them do seem a tad thinner; perhaps they were planed down for a second use ...

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The 'Remembering a Carver - the Sequel' video is ready ...

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A strange juxtaposition ...

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The 'next' blog post on these Conversations was supposed to be one showing some of the printing work on the 'Octopus' project, but that post is getting pushed back just a bit by something else went on here today, something that might be of keen interest to many of our long-time fans. What's unusual about this photo?

It seems like a bit of a strange juxtaposition: this is the room on the 2nd floor of the Mokuhankan building, the place which houses our 'collection' of old prints and books (this is the same room where Print Parties were held in the first few years of the Asakusa shop being open, before those moved down to a new space on the 1st floor). But what's my carving bench doing here? That normally 'lives' downstairs too ...

Well, perhaps a few more snapshots of the room will clear things up. Here we are, with the setup basically finished, ready to record. That white plastic bag on the floor next to the bench is a big clue ...

Looking in the opposite direction, we see a duvet on the floor, and my laptop. Can you read what is on the screen?

Move the view a bit to the right ... and the setup should be more understandable ...

This screenshot from the partially edited project should put all the pieces together!

From this viewpoint, you can't see the duvet, which is pulled forward to cover my left foot ...

So when will the finished video be up on YouTube? Well, not tonight, that's for sure. There is a ton more editing still to go, and I also can't ignore the fat deck of wet printing paper that is sitting upstairs calling for attention.

But anyway, this is simply to let the fans know that there is indeed another video coming soon ... just hang on a bit longer please! :-)

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The printer's workspace ...

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(This is a ‘Safe for Work’ series of blog posts about the production process, not the image itself …)

Continued from Octopus and Diver Printing (2) | Starting point of the thread is here

Before we start the actual printing, let's take a look at the workspace:

This isn't my own 'personal' workspace; this is one of the workstations upstairs over the Asakusa shop. I haven't done any 'real' printing work since we opened up this shop, but around ten years ago, on a web page with a workshop Soundscape, I showed a similar photo of the workbench in my Ome home (to which I might be returning sooner rather than later ...)

The numbers in that image:

1. the sample print chosen from the previous testing to serve as a 'model' for this batch
2. a water brush, resting on top of its bucket (with just around a centimetre of water inside)
3. on the small shelf in front of me, another small cup with water (and a 'hakobi' applicator)
4. the brush for the colour in use
5. the block set for this print (carved on both sides)
6. the baren in use, and a couple of others standing by
7. the bench is positioned on a raised floor, leaving a space for my legs underneath
8. iTunes!
9. the collection of mixed pigments - and matching brushes - for this print
10. the stack of paper waiting for printing (in-stack)
11. a small cup with the pigment for this impression
12. a small cup with paste
13. the block itself
14. the stack of printed paper (out-stack)

Here is a closeup. This is of course all set up ready for use by a left-handed printer - baren and brush on the left, the out-stack on the right ...

It's not so clear from that image but all of the 'active' parts of this setup - the piece I am sitting on, the printing bench itself, and the shelf holding the in-stack - are all moveable; they slide back and forth. Once I am 'down in the hole', I slide my seat forward a bit and pull the printing bench towards me over my knees, then when I am ready to begin printing, the in-stack tray also slides forward a bit, putting the paper perfectly within reach.

Looking from the side, you can see that the printing bench itself is built on an angle. This is an extremely important point - the printer's forearm ends up moving over the bench in the same orientation as the block itself, and the wrist is never bent or 'cocked' (we'll see how this works in later images ...)

That's the basic setup ... in the next post, we'll see how the action moves along ...

This thread continues in Octopus and Diver Printing (4) | Information on getting the print is here

'Shrink' back down ...

More preparation of the paper ...

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(This is a ‘Safe for Work’ series of blog posts about the production process, not the image itself …)

Continued from Octopus and Diver Printing (1)

The paper for this initial batch of prints is now nicely toned, but I'm not ready to begin printing just yet; there are a couple more important preparatory steps to be done.

First of these is pressing the paper. This is not something we do for all our paper for all our jobs. But these days the surface of the paper that we receive sometimes has a quite rough texture, and if the print we are making has very delicate lines, these will be very difficult to print.

So we have developed the habit of 'calendaring' much of our paper before printing begins, and for this we use a small etching press. Each sheet is first slipped into a clear mylar folder, to keep it clean on the press bed:

It's difficult to describe in words how much pressure is appropriate. We're not trying to 'crush' the paper, just get the top surface smoothed out.

It comes out of the mylar folder now completely smoothed (on both sides, of course), and the delicate printing work will now require much less baren pressure, resulting in more delicate lines.

Once this was all done for the entire batch of paper, I moved on to the next preparatory step - 'manicuring' the paper. That perhaps doesn't make much sense in English; it's just a translation of マニキュアをする (' do manicuring '), the phrase our printers here use for this process.

When making a multi-coloured print, with many impressions, many of which require extremely delicate registration, it is vitally important that we carefully protect the corner of the sheet - the corner that slides into the registration marks. Over time, and repeated impressions, the corner can become slightly 'worn' or damaged, and the registration becomes difficult.

So we use a clear nail polish ('top coat'), and brush it on the paper in the registration corner. This gives it enough body to survive the subsequent printing stages and remain clear and sharp right to the end.

This is not something we 'invented'; I read somewhere someplace that in the old days a printer might have done the same thing for expensive and delicate work. They of course didn't have 'top coat', and it seems they used a small dab of urushi lacquer.

You have to be really careful not to let the corner of the sheet touch any other area of the paper; if even a tiny dot of the nail polish gets on some other part of the paper, it will affect the printing.

And now - after all these preparation stages - it is finally time to moisten the stack of paper ready for printing to begin:

I'm doing this in the early afternoon, and will come back to the stack again in the late afternoon to shuffle through it, and make sure the amount of moisture is exactly what I need. Tomorrow morning - printing begins!

And to close off today ... a view of the door of the paper freezer in our workshop. Those of you who saw the blog post last week know what this is about ... The final yellow dot is gone. Everybody else is now working from home, and I have the entire workshop to myself ...

This thread continues in Octopus and Diver Printing (3) | Information on getting the print is here

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The April 2020 update from Mokuhankan ...

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It has been an eventful month for us, as I'm sure it has been for you. The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the world as we know it, and we hope you are managing to stay in good health as we learn to navigate our new environment.

The biggest change here at Mokuhankan has of course been the closing of our physical shop in Asakusa. But although many of our fans are disappointed that they were unable to join a Print Party this spring, the shop closing has meant that we have been able to concentrate all our energies on making actual … you know … woodblock prints!

Dave - holding down the fort in Asakusa - is acting as 'Command Central', assigning the jobs, preparing the paper with the proper sizing, and then arranging for all the materials to be sent out to each of the printers working at home. And then a couple of weeks later, the delivery man shows up with a package!

This is the Koitsu design 'Fuji from Tago Bay' freshly re-printed by Top Gun Chiharu Kawai, working from her family home out in Nagano Prefecture. She has done a fabulous job capturing the mist below the mountain … [Order page]

Coincidentally another Koitsu image, this one is 'Matsushima', just completed by Shun Yamamoto, working at home in a northern suburb of Tokyo … [Order page]

Dave has now checked each of these batches and sent them over to the Ome shipping centre, where they will be prepped and packaged, ready for shipping.

This one is a little bit different - not a Mokuhankan publication. But even though they have never seen this before, many of our fans will instantly be able to guess who designed (and carved, and printed) it … yes, our Print Party staff member Ayumi Shiba, known for her ghost and horror prints! Ayumi-san's initial batch of her latest design - famous ninja warrior Danzo Kato - is now available through our web shop ...

Our 'core' business of producing subscription prints is moving along at a steady pace, even though some of the subscribers are having to wait longer than normal for their prints to arrive because of postal delays around the world. We normally don't show the images until after they have shipped, but this proof copy of Early Morning Ride (the May print), produced by our printer young Rei-chan, is just too beautiful to keep under wraps! [Information page]

Is that all the news we have this month? Nope … we have one more!

For our final announcement this time around, we have something that - admittedly - is not for everyone. In fact, knowing this, we won't show an image of our newest print here on this page. But if you have been aware of a project that Dave has been working on in the background for a couple of years now … an image involving an octopus … you might have been waiting for this long-delayed announcement.

Dave himself has now started work on the initial batch of these prints, but for future batches will turn the blocks over to the staff printers. If you know what this project is about, and if it is to your taste, then you will find more information at this link (Note: contains erotic content ...).

That's all for now … Thank you all very much for your interest in our work, and for your support of our activities.

Please do what you can to stay healthy and stable during these difficult times!

Dave

Asakusa, Tokyo

'Shrink' back down ...

The first in a series of 'safe for work' blog posts showing the process of printing Hokusai's Octopus and Diver image ...

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It was the summer of 2016 that this project got underway - the plan to make a Mokuhankan reproduction of Hokusai's most iconic shunga work, the famous 'Octopus and Diver' image.

But here I am, beginning a series of blog posts that will outline the process of printing the image, and yet understanding that many people - people who want to learn about woodblock printmaking - are not so comfortable with viewing it. What to do?

Here's the basic 'ground rule' I will follow for the series of blog posts that will follow over the next couple of weeks, as the print comes to life: the intent of these blog posts is to discuss technical points of how the print is made, and to illustrate them with photos; it is not to illustrate the image itself. So that's the rule - these posts will be 'safe for work', as the saying goes ...

OK, let's get to it!

The initial step with all of our printing here is to prepare the washi (Japanese paper) for the work. We receive it in a 'raw' state, and it is not suitable for printing in that condition - before we can use it, we must 'size' it ... coat it with a glue mixture.

That's what I am doing in this image - brushing a mixture of hot nikawa (gelatine) and alum across both sides of each sheet:

The gelatine serves to add body and strength to the paper, which would otherwise be too structurally too weak to survive the vigorous process of being rubbed against the woodblocks. The alum stops the colourants from spreading out among the paper fibres; with this 'barrier' in place, the colours stay within the lines ...

Once the stack of paper for a batch of prints is thoroughly saturated with the liquid (they don't stick together!), they are hung in pairs to dry, on cords we have stretched across one room of our workshop:

The idea is that the sheets should dry quite slowly - in order not to wrinkle and buckle - so once I have finished hanging all the sheets, the doors to the room will be shut tightly to decrease air flow. (In summer, when the air is much more damp, the doors can be left slightly ajar ...).

The sheets of paper you are seeing here have been trimmed from a larger sheet that we receive from Iwano-san the maker. Each of these will make two of the Hokusai prints.

Once dry, the sheets would normally go straight to the printer's bench, ready to be moistened for printing, but in the case of this Octopus image, we are going to add an extra step at this point - toning the paper.

When I ran an initial test group of these prints some time ago, I was disappointed in the overall 'mood' of the completed print. It was very crisply carved ... very smoothly printed ... but was just too 'clean' in overall feeling. The original of this design wasn't a very special production, done on expensive paper. It was just one page of a book, and a very cheaply produced book at that. The carving was rough (and broken in many places), the colours were mis-registered, and there was no attempt at all to try and get the left and right halves - carved and printed on separate woodblocks - lined up properly. These are all 'defects', and yet when I had corrected all these things in my reproduction, I found that the overall feeling was just too clean and neat.

Now I wasn't about to go back and damage the lines of my carving, nor will I willingly make prints with poor registration, but I did need to do something to make the print somewhat less 'perfectly clean', so I did a test run using paper that I had 'toned' with pigment, to make it appear less clean and neat. The result was much more suited to this image, so that is what we will do with this coming edition ... we'll add a bit of toning to the paper before we start the actual printing.

The process isn't so difficult. In the 'old days' such toning was sometimes done with persimmon juice, but as that liquid is quite acidic in nature, I want to use a method that is less destructive to the paper, so I simply use a light mixture of the same type of pigments that we will be using in the printing itself - in this case, a blend of red and yellow will produce a sandy tone:

Unlike the sizing process, where the brush shouldn't be allowed to touch the same area of the paper more than once, this brushing is much more relaxed. I use the brush to pass over both sides of the paper, touching here and there until the overall effect seems basically smooth.

(Also, you can see that the larger pieces have now been cut in half, to the dimension we will use for printing ... with a bit of extra length at one end where they can be hung up ...)

Each sheet is then hung over in the same place where the sheets hang after being sized. This time, they are hung one by one, as if they were allowed to touch, visible marks in the toned colour would result ...

That's it for the first part of the preparation. Once dry, the batch of sheets will then need still a couple of preparatory steps before it can head to the printer's bench, ready to be moistened for the printing work to begin ...

This thread continues in Octopus and Diver Printing (2) | Information on getting the print is here

'Shrink' back down ...

Time ... well past time! ... for an update on our situation here at Mokuhankan!

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Time ... well past time! ... for an update on our situation here at Mokuhankan!

First things first - I need to let our fans know that all of the Mokuhankan team are currently in a basically 'safe' position. To my knowledge, none of us have been touched personally by the virus; team members and their families have so far been spared from direct illness. And although we have reduced our employment here, all those members whose work disappeared with the closing of our Print Parties and the Asakusa shop are either young people still living at home, or they have a spouse in regular employment, or have picked up different jobs here (or a mix of those things). None of us is in any kind of desperate condition.

So, just what is our situation?

As I said, the Asakusa shop is closed, and will remain so for the foreseeable future:

Tokyo is not on 'lockdown', although of course it should be. Unlike the situation over in Canada (as I hear from my daughters), where the three levels of government are working together well (and communicating effectively), and where the general community is on board with what needs to be done to stop the spread of the virus, Japan is very poorly led and coordinated, and there is wide-spread confusion and ignorance about how best to handle the situation. (Most of the bars, hostess clubs, and restaurants in my immediate neighbourhood were trying to do 'business as usual' last night ...)

Anyway, enough of that. What's happening here now at Mokuhankan?

Although our public-facing activities (Print Parties, etc.) are now shut down, we are still publishing. It is in the nature of most of our work that it can be done perfectly well in a quiet solo environment (at home), and that is how we are proceeding. Here's a photo from last month that I took when I was opening a fresh package of washi paper; you can see below the shelf the door of the small freezer where we store our printing paper overnight.

Here's a straight shot of the door of the unit - it holds the schedule for our in-house group of printers, showing which days they intend to be here during each week. In normal times, I refer to this schedule early every morning, in order to take the necessary paper packages out of the freezer so that they will be defrosted by the time the people arrive for work a couple of hours later.

That was a nice busy week! But what does the schedule look like now? Here's a shot from this morning:

Today is Saturday, the far right-hand column. Just one lonely printer, our young Rei-chan (who lives just a few blocks away, so for her it's safe to stroll over here to work). She is working on the subscription print for May, while the rest of the building sits dark and silent ...

OK, so that's the 'sad' side to the story - our previously bustling, chaotic, and energetic shop is now shuttered and dark. But ... but ... but ... that's not the only side of course! As I write this today:

• printer Chiharu Kawai (the other staff refer to her as 'the machine') is at her home in Nagano working through a thick batch of the Fuji at Tago Bay prints. Even before she is finished, a package with blocks and paper will arrive at her door for the next job, a batch of the May subscription print.
• printer Yamamoto-san is over at his own home, vigorously working on another batch of our Great Waves!
• young carver Noriko Kawasaki is busy with the set of colour blocks for the subscription print for July (referencing another well-known hit anime film)
• ex-Print Party hostess Ayumi Shiba - famous for her self-designed/carved/printed horror prints - is busy over at a bench in the Ome workroom, making the initial run of a brand new design (based on historical ninja episodes)
• carver Tsoi Wai Chung is scrunched over his workbench at home, where he has just finished the block set for the June subscription print, and is now splitting his time between work on the August print, and carving of the second print in the '8 Views of Cats' series - Night Rain
• our two 'packing ladies' over in Ome are working (alternate days) in the shipping center, keeping up with the subscription print packaging, and preparing orders coming in through the website
• two of the previous shop attendants - Rose-san and Yamada-san - are working in combination to get more Flea Market prints onto the website. He was here all day yesterday scanning prints and uploading them to an S3 bucket, from where Rose will access the images, and prepare the web pages
• our oldest (as in 'being here the longest') printer Yasue Tsushima is working from her home out in Ome, trying to make space with her three kids all around, currently finishing up a batch of one of the Ukiyo-e Heroes prints, ready for sending over to Jed-san
• Cameron is holed up safely away from Tokyo in his suburban home, splitting his time between customer emails, order processing for the Ome crew, and of course time with his family (expanding any minute now with his second child due soon!)
• printer Kawai-san (Mr. K - well-known to our Print Party attendees ...) is at a new bench in his family's home out in the wilds of Chiba. He's 'warming up' with some of our small HangaClub prints before getting assigned some more complex work
• Aoyama-san is dropping by Asakusa now and then, to work on getting more blank woodblocks prepared for our carvers. In between times, he has now begun to pick up a ball that I dropped around ten years ago, and is contacting some blade makers, with the intention of seeing if it is practical to revive our project to create our own line of tools ...
• We. Are. Busy.

A couple of names were missing there ... our other Ayumi-san (O-hashi, formerly Miyashita) did start up a new project, just over a week ago. Recognize this image?

She had no sooner got an initial proof batch done - and I had just given her the 'go-ahead' for printing a batch - when she heard from their day-care center about a shut-down, and has had to hang up her baren again for the duration. She'll be back ...

Suga-san has been off on a rest-break for a few weeks, but last I heard she was now ready to re-start, from a bench at home. As soon as I get confirmation of that, I'll be sending her the (now completed) set of blocks for the initial print (Evening Snow) in the 8 Views of Cats set. If her initial proofing looks good, she will get busy with the initial batch!

Here was me, on a stream the other day, working on the final block in the set ...

So, with almost everybody out of here ... am I enjoying my peaceful quiet time?

Eh? Quiet? I'm at the center of all these activities, trying to keep everything moving! And that reminds me, let me dig up a photo taken here a couple of weeks back:

Who knows, perhaps this (bad) photo might turn out to have historical interest, when seen from sometime in the future (or not). This is me, together with the crew from Miyakodori, the new publisher of shin-hanga style woodblock prints (information on their new prints is here.) This is printer Shun Yamamoto, designer Shinji Tsuchimochi, and publisher Takashi Kashiwagi ... They made a visit to deliver the initial batch of the Twilight at Nihonbashi print. Although the publishing environment is obviously not so 'healthy' at the moment, they are going to press ahead with more designs. We'll let you know when more arrive ...

Once the 8 Cats block that you just saw was completed, I got started right away on another project that can't be delayed - cutting the block set for the Patreon Chibies - the pair of prints that will be sent to supporters of our Patreon project over the coming months:

As with all the previous Patreon Chibies, this one was designed by long-time friend printmaker John Amoss. One of the pair is always about traditional printmaking, and the other one always has the concept 'support' hidden in it somewhere. I'm busy with the keyblock now, and of course will then move on with the colour blocks. Once the set is ready, I'll see if Yamamoto-san (in the photo above) wants a nice simple job to keep him busy for a week or so (we need a lot of copies of these!)

In the middle of all this ... I am trying to block out some time for a couple of days work on a proofing project - a project that has been bubbling along in the background for a couple of years now (years!). Finally, the set of blocks for a certain Octopus design are pretty much ready for final proofing ...

So ... why would I have titled this blog update 'A Touch of Levity'?

Well, although some of you might laugh at the shape of my lunch-time muffins, they don't taste all that bad! (And they sure disappear quickly!)

But it wasn't that kind of 'levity' I was thinking of. It's because of a scene from this morning's live Twitch stream. (Preserved here for a couple of weeks).

Regular viewers know that on those days when I add the extra 'outside view' camera, they might be treated to a view of the famous 'Levitating Lamppost of Asakusa'!

:-)

See you next time!

'Shrink' back down ...

Another episode of block wear from our Party room!

'Stretch' to read the full entry | Separate page

A few years back, I made a post on this blog attempting to answer one of the most common questions we get asked here: "How many prints can you make from a block before it gets worn out?"

At that time, I answered by showing one of the woodblocks used in the Print Party room in our Asakusa shop. Well today ... I can basically repeat that post, almost word for word!

Take a look at this ...

... and a closeup:

This is the 'yellow' block for the print we have been using in the Print Parties for nearly a year - our famous 'Microwave'. It has been clear for some weeks that it has reached the end of life. It has become so worn that the carved areas no longer reach to the black outlines, and people have been thinking that their registration is off.

But just as with the replacement block for the Momotaro print some years ago, the solution for this is the same - it's just a matter of a couple of hours work (on the back side of the same piece!) to recut it:

Clean and sharp! Ready for another few thousand copies!

Here's another 'before/after' pair for comparison:

And I can simply repeat the same sentence I used to end the previous blog post! "The one I'm dreading is of course the day when the key block for our Great Wave print becomes unusable. We're a long way off that day yet, but given how long it will take to get a fresh set up and running, we had better start planning soon!"

'Shrink' back down ...