Welcome to the Japanese Print section of my website

A quick history and how woodblock prints are produced:

Woodblock-printed books from Chinese Buddhist temples were seen in Japan as early as the eighth century. In 764 the Empress Shotuku commissioned one million small wooden pagodas, each containing a small woodblock scroll printed with a Buddhist text. 
By the eleventh century, Buddhist temples in Japan were producing their own printed books of sutras, mandalas, and other Buddhist texts and images. For centuries, printing was restricted only to the Buddhist sphere, as it was too expensive for mass production, and did not have a receptive, literate public to which such things might be marketed.
It was not until 1590 that the first secular work would be printed in Japan.   

Over the next  200 years, the medium gained popularity among artists, and was used to produce small, cheap, art prints as well as books. 
Many publishing houses arose and grew, publishing both books and individual prints.

The Production of Japanese Woodblock Prints

The production of classic Japanese woodblock prints is a fairly complex process, involving a number of steps, each usually performed by a different person, one skilled in that particular step.
Japanese prints were sometimes produced in limited editions as 'high art', more usually they were produced in far larger editions as popular, mass-produced art, art that was originally intended to be transitory.
.
The Publisher and Artist 

Woodblock prints were almost always initiated by a collaboration between an artist and a publisher.  The relationship between artist and publisher was usually a fairly straightforward contractual one, in which the artist was paid an agreed sum per design.

The artist would start by producing a preparatory sketch, with the most detail in areas like faces, etc. He  would make alterations and corrections by gluing new paper over the desired areas.
The artist would then pass this drawing to a block-copyist, who then made an elaborated final copy, a very fine black and white paper drawing, the hanshita-e on very thin mino paper, which showed the (usually black) lines which outlined everything in the image. 
The completed drawing would then be shown to the official censors, and after being passed, it would go to a carver, who specialized in carving the blocks used to produce the print.

The Block Carvers
The job of the block carver was a very important one, and it was reckoned that it took 10 years to become a good block carver. .
The carver would start with a block of single-petaled white mountain cherry wood, usually carefully aged and selected to prevent warping. Larger images were produced by linking together multiple independently printed images.
He would paste the original drawing to the block, face-down. The paper would then be made transparent by either treating with oil, or peeling off a thin layer of paper with the flat of the finger, thus revealing the negative of the lines which the block had to produce.
All outlines were cut at a slightly inward sloping side, to prevent chipping of the wood. The carver would then carve away the material where no ink was to be printed, using a large set of chisels specially made for this task. 
A number of prints were then printed using just this one block, and the artist indicated, on one copy for each colour, which areas should be in which colours. These copies were in turn pasted to blocks, and used to guide the carvers in making additional blocks for the colored areas, one block per colour. It was not uncommon for prints to contain as many as 15 or so colours.
This registration was done with registration devices, called kento. 
Once printing had begun, alterations or addition to the blocks were made by plugging areas with new pieces of wood. 

The Printers
The third set of artisans were the printers, skilled in making the inks (both vegetable and mineral inks were used), and applying them, especially to get the shading (called bokashi).
The grinding of pigments was one of the steps trainee printers had to master.
The printing was done in fairly straightforward fashion; ink was applied to the block, which was face up, using brushes (hake) made from a horse's mane. Rice-starch was sometimes added to the block, to give better adhesion and colour depth. The paper was then laid down on the block, using the kento to line it up, and the ink was rubbed onto the paper using a circular or semi-circular motion.

The shading is produced by a number of different techniques, such as:wiping the blocks with a cotton cloth or pad after the application of the ink;using brushes with varying color intensity and moisture level;rubbing the block with a damp cloth before applying the ink.A single sheet took around 15 to 25 seconds to produce, on a particular block, depending on whether or not bokashi was needed.

Repeat Printing
Actually, sometimes a block would get used more than once, You can see this technique being used in many prints, especially ones that show sky or water; in the middle or the edge of the water, which is generally light blue, there will be a band of dark blue water.
.

Special Effects
A large number of special techniques were used to produce various unusual effects.
The most common was blind-printin, This did not use any ink at all - rather, a pattern was impressed into the paper. The process involved lightly dampening the paper, and then using any one of a number of implements (a piece of ivory, or the edge of a baren, or even the printer's elbow) to produce three-dimensional effects in the paper.
Black areas could be surface polished in the similar shomenzuri technique (but with the block behind the paper, and the rubbing from the front of the paper, instead of the opposite process used with karazuri) to give the impression of lacquer or silk.
The printing process could finished off with applications of ground mica, called kirazuri, to make the picture sparkle, or give a glowing ground. Mica was sometimes used in the entire background of deluxe bijin and actor prints, but was more often seen as an overlay on areas of color. .

Editions
Apparently, the average print run was two hundred copies or so, although the number could run into the thousands for a popular design. 

 

............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................