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This morning while I was outside taking pictures of the new storefront, I was asked several times, "What kind of shop is this?" and "Are you open?"

As some of you may have heard this morning during the live stream on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/japaneseprintmaking), Dave mentioned the effect this new poster had on the shop yesterday. While the staff were running Print Parties upstairs, he got some work done down on the first floor to prepare for our shop's upcoming move downstairs, and one of the tasks was mounting on the wall by the entrance this enormous blown-up version of our famous Rickshaw Cart image from the Ukiyo-e Heroes series.

This is what it looks like in the evening.

Even though our shop had already closed, once this bright sign was up and illuminated, he said that a large number of people noticed the brightly lit image and asked him about Mokuhankan while he was outside doing construction work. Several then went upstairs with Dave and bought some prints!

Having a street-level entrance surrounded by inviting images will make a big difference in our number of walk-in customers, and we are excited for the change. We just hope we can also keep up with making enough prints for everyone!

So, to answer those customers' questions: Mokuhankan is a woodblock print shop utilizing traditional techniques and tools to create a variety of beautiful woodblock prints from classical and modern designs. And yes, we are planning to stay open throughout the entire transition period from the second floor down to the first. We hope to see you here soon!

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It was just about a year ago that our young printer Ayumi-san made our first edition of this design, and it didn't last long in our catalogue and online shop. We had initially thought it might be a bit dark and gloomy for many people's taste, but we were wrong ... it became one of our most popular prints.

After she left to have her baby, we had nobody else on staff who could produce this design, but a few weeks back, I decided to give the blocks to our printer Shun Yamamoto, the young man who has been making our Great Waves for the past half year or so, working under older printer Kenichi Kubota.

He was glad to have the change to try something different, as he has never done any of this shin-hanga work before, but he had Ayumi's proofs and progress sheets to help him work it out, and the results are very nice ...

It's in our catalogue here.

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We are closed every Tuesday, so we decided to do the majority of the work on Tuesday when we would not have too many visiting customers. We arranged for a scaffolding rental company to drop off a two-floor scaffolding tower early in the morning, and we put it all together so we could reach the sign.

The next step was cleaning up the area around and below the sign. Breaking stuff is fun!

After cleaning that all up, we took a close look at what we had to work with and planned how to bring the sign down and utilize the materials that were already in place. This took some thinking and a trip to the hardware store / home center, but with quick thinking from Dave and Aoyama-san, a great solution was found.

To move forward, we removed the main visible part of the sign and washed it off. While doing that, others unbolted the sign's frame and tied it in place on top of the scaffolding.

We then prepared the new mounting location and got the frame in place again. With daylight running out, we took a break overnight.

Today, we took some time finalizing the new brackets and remounting the sign. I think it looks pretty great!

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Work is under way on the next Print Party design ...

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As we announced (quietly) in our Kickstarter campaign last autumn, we are planning a special new item for our Print Party room in the Asakusa shop.

Work is under way, and here's a screenshot taken during one of this week's live streams on Twitch:

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Showing the initial stages of work on the 2018 Patreon Chibi prints ...

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The clock is ticking faster every day, and among the ever-growing group of deadlines that are rushing towards me is the 1st anniversary of the start of our Patreon 'campaign' last year.

I very much need to pay attention to this - not just for sentimental reasons to acknowledge the beginning - but for important practical reasons ... I need to make more prints for the gifts to send out to the Patreons!

One of the participation levels of the campaign (information here, by the way), is the 'Chibi Supporter', and we have promised to send two small prints each year to supporters at this level. Last year we commissioned two designs from my friend John Amoss, and everybody was so pleased with the two prints, that we have asked him for another pair this year. According to our Patreon schedule, the first of the new ones will be due to be shipped in mid-May, so I had better get busy! Let's look at where I've got to so far:

I did most of the carving of the key block during the morning Twitch stream a week or so ago. Among the Twitch viewers are a number of Patreon supporters, and I think they particularly enjoy seeing the print come to life this way ...

Here's a scan of the completed key block, with the traces of the original design still stuck to the wood, just before washing ...

... and just after washing:

The next step - before colour block carving can begin - is to take a number of proof impressions from the key block on a fairly strong paper. These will be used to transfer the colour information to fresh blocks. On goes the black pigment!

The beautiful block will never be clean again!

Here's what the key impression looks like:

I'll make as many of them as I think I need for colour blocks, and for this project, I'll be carving five more 'sides' (using two new pieces of wood, and the unused reverse side of the key block).

And here's a scan of the now 'used' key block ...

In the next entry, we'll see how those sheets are 'coloured', ready for pasting onto fresh blocks ...

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Shiba-san and Dave sized a batch of paper this morning ...

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In recent weeks, the three prints that our staff member Shiba-san has made for inclusion in our Mokuhankan catalogue have been selling very well. There are two types of people who are finding them interesting: general visitors to the shop, who pull them out of the browser bins and ask us "Tell me about this interesting print ...", and viewers of our Twitch stream, who have been introduced to these images on one of our recent live streams.

And today was another example of that ... she and I were sizing some paper this morning (for her to use in her next batch of prints), and the Twitchers were following along, commenting and chatting as we went.

Here are a few photos I snapped of her doing the work:

The live streams are run from my laptop, which sits on the counter next to the container of hot size, something that gives the Twitch viewers nervous fits ...

You can see the setup here; she is laying the next sheet in place on the stack of wet sized paper; the stream camera is visible at the right, as is the 'hotel warmer' - the electrically-heated device we use to keep the size mixture warm and ready for application.

And here she is - in her patented 'ninja crouch' - brushing the fluid across the sheet ...

After the completed stack has 'cured' for a short time - but before it gets too sticky and difficult to separate - she peels them apart, puts a hanging clip on each pair of sheets (back to back), and ...

... hangs them up to dry!

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We just received the latest batch of the newest Ukiyo-e Heroes print yesterday.

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We just received the latest batch of the newest Ukiyo-e Heroes print yesterday. This is 'The Dragon's Gift', a design that was part of our Kickstarter campaign last autumn. I'll post about the print itself shortly, but for now, here are a couple of photos showing how I put the embossing of the craftsman's craftspersons' names in place ...

We use polymer plates for doing this embossing. We have them prepared for us commercially, and have a complete set of name pairs - each of the four people who are carving for us, paired with all of our printers.

The combination on this one is Carver: Nagao / Printer: Kubota, and these are Ms. Yumi Nagao, who is a 'new face' with us and Mr. Kenichi Kubota, who has been doing print jobs for us for some years now.

I usually do this work in the morning, during the daily live stream:

You can see my laptop in the background, with the streaming software up and running. There is a chat window also there, where the comments from viewers are constantly streaming by ... it's sometimes very difficult to keep up with them!

That's the view from the other direction ... the camera running the live stream is visible, as is our stream 'mascot' - the owl who the Twitchers have dubbed 'Refrigerator' ... (it's a long story ...)

And here is the result ... a nice rich embossing of the names of the people who made this print!

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We have a new blog management system ...

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A couple of months back, our web hosting service did a major update on the suite of software installed on their servers. While I generally appreciate that they are trying to keep current and up-to-date, this constant process of updating sometimes causes huge problems on the back end of our site. This time around, their update broke the blogging software that I have been using for many years, and because I wasn't aware of the upcoming update, I hadn't been able to export our data before the system 'broke'.

So our blog has been out of action for a while now, waiting for me to figure out a way to get the data into a more modern system. I managed to extract much of the raw information from the database (posts, comments, etc.) going back about fifteen years, but I wasn't sure what to do with it; I just don't trust any of the blogging systems that are out there ... they either go out of business, get bought out and closed down, or get updated to the point where old data becomes unusable.

I mulled it over for a while, and then decided that I might just as well do it myself ... so over the past week or so, I have spent some time each evening putting together our own CMS for running our blogs, and it is now ready for use. The previous couple of posts today (the one Cameron did about the garden, and the one showing shop progress), were both done through the new interface.

I didn't have to write it completely from scratch, as I previously built similar modules (image uploading, resizing, etc.) to be part of our 'Manager System'.

One of the great advantages of writing your own software like this is that you don't have to make it work 'for everybody'; it just needs to do what we need, so there is no bloat and no extra features. It's simple, clean, and easy to use (and the code is very simple and easy to maintain.)

So hopefully we'll be blogging a lot more frequently from now on ... Is that a feature, or a bug?

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We've been very lax in bringing updates on the 1st floor construction to our fans! But it can't be helped - the work itself is going very slowly.

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We've been very lax in bringing updates on the 1st floor construction to our fans! But it can't be helped - the work itself is going very slowly.

This isn't due to any lack of interest on our part, it's of course simply because we are far too busy with our 'normal' work to be able to spend much time working down there. When we built our 2nd floor shop a few years back, three of us - myself, staff member Aoyama-san, and my son-in-law Ioan - spent around two months on the job, but were pretty much at it full time. This time around, it's only two of us (me and Aoyama-san), and we're both completely 'full' with our normal work responsibilities ...

This isn't the way we had planned it; we had originally expected to be starting the work late last year - in the quietest time of our year - but the previous tenant was very late in getting clear of the building, and by the time we got started, the busy spring season was almost on us.

And we hadn't planned on doing the work with just the two of us; we had made arrangements for an experienced young man to join us for a month, expecting that he would really make headway through much of the cabinetry, but he quit before getting much of anything done ...

But it doesn't much matter; our shop upstairs on the 2nd floor is of course still open, and our new space will be ready ... when it's ready!

Here are a few photos I took this evening ... it seems hard to believe that there is an attractive little shop 'hidden' in there somewhere ... can you see it? :-)

Here's the entranceway; as you can see, we've been accumulating a lot of construction waste over the past few weeks. Once we enough built up, we'll rent a truck and take it to a garbage/recycling centre:

Moving inside, we see the main room; the area on the left will be the main counter. It's actually already mostly built, but is here covered with general construction junk:

Over on the right hand of the room are the constructions that will become the browser bins full of interesting prints:

As we move further back, you can now see the area that will be the Print Party room. Please believe me when I tell you that it will be quite an attractive space when it's done!

Did you notice the angled ceiling 'beams' in that shot? They will be the basic support for these:

These are panels made of woven strips of finely planed wood. The ceiling in our current Party room has a similar structure, and we wanted something similar for this new space. Here's a closer view of the weave:

It's real wood, and I think that as it ages, it will take on a pleasant patina ... The floor of the space will be tatami mats, and the walls will be plastered. Interesting things happen in interesting spaces!

Against the rear wall will be a sink for washing brushes, etc., as well as the Coffee Corner. Part-way up the wall, will be a pair of shoji screens. We've found a pair of antique ones, and although they don't look like much just yet, once they are cleaned up and re-papered, they'll be beautiful!

I'll bring you another update when there is something to show! For now, I've got to get going on one of the waiting jobs ... perhaps preparing the colour separations for the next subscription print; checking a stack of prints on my desk from the workroom upstairs; sizing the next batch of paper; pushing forward with the carving of the new Print Party image that is now in preparation; getting some 'script' ideas ready for the next YouTube video; printing a batch of the 'Young Girl in Water' design that so many people are waiting for; prepare the colour blocks for the 2018 Patreon Chibi prints; do some more testing on the new module for our Management software system (more about this in the next blog post); place a bid on an interesting set of old woodblocks that is coming up on an auction this evening ... and somewhere, an octopus is waiting ... :-)

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For only a few weeks a year, Denpoin Gardens are open to the public... come take a look!

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For only a few weeks a year, Denpoin Gardens (next to Sensoji Temple here in Asakusa) are open to the public. Last Tuesday, David and I went on a walk through these beautiful gardens as the sakura were in full bloom! It was simply beautiful, and these smartphone pictures don't do it justice.

A few years ago, David took a stroll slightly later in the year and shot some video during that visit. Check out the closing scene of Part 13 of the Great Wave video series.

https://youtu.be/bm1pafO6LnI?t=15m51s.

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The next Loot print is now online ...

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It's the first of the month (here in Tokyo) so it's time to post the image of last month's subscription print ... #3 in the Legendary Loot series. A rather frantic gamer ... who has perhaps collected a little bit too much 'loot' ...

See the three prints made to date here ...

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William Francis joins our printers in the printing room, getting some advice from David Bull and other staff as he gets to work printing ...

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William Francis joins our printers in the printing room, getting some advice from David Bull and other staff as he gets to work printing. It's an exciting time for Japanese woodblock printmaking, as more and more people produce new and exciting designs!

See more of what William Francis is up to on his Instagram account here

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Hello! Cameron here. Last year in April, David Bull was in a program on NHK here in Japan called, "I love TOKYO - A Woodblock Artist in Asakusa".

Because it was so popular, it's getting run again ...

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Hello! Cameron here. Last year in April, David Bull was in a program on NHK here in Japan called, "I love TOKYO - A Woodblock Artist in Asakusa".

Because it was so popular, it's getting run again on TV and online early in February!
NHK World: 2/7 (Wed) 8:30 am, 14:30, 21:30
2/8 (Thur) 2:30 am
NHK BS1: 2/9 (Fri) 3:30 am

All these times are Japan times, of course. You can tune in via NHK World's Live Stream or Video on Demand.

nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/schedule/

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