Finally, after nearly two months since the previous posting, work on the next print - The Seacoast in Summer - has begun.

What have I been doing during that time? Well, the edition for the Forest in Spring had to be printed (two batches of 100+ sheets each), which took a day or two! After that, I made a 10-day trip to Canada on the occasion of daughter Fumi's graduation from the University of British Columbia. And unfortunately, those two 'jobs' didn't line up exactly, so I had a week-long gap between the end of the printing and the start of the trip, too short to get involved with starting the next print. But that time wasn't wasted, as I used it for pushing the construction on my downstairs workroom along a bit. But I'm safely back in Tokyo now, and ready to get back in harness on the Solitudes project!

But I have some 'bad' news for you. For the first five prints in this series, I have been very open with most of the production process, showing everything from first drawings right through to the finished print. This time though, I am going to do it a different way - I'm not going to show any photographs, etc. that will have enough detail to allow you to see what the print will look like. Here's why.

The Seacoast in Summer is (chronologically) the first of the visits to the sea in this series. It was actually my first camping trip to that location, and it was very enjoyable, exploring the new place. I enjoyed beautiful clear weather ... sunny skies during the day, and ... a beautiful full moon that night.

Hmm ... full moon ... deep dark sky ... water ... The print kind of suggests itself, doesn't it.

And that's the problem. That design has indeed 'suggested itself' to pretty much every person working in the shin-hanga field, getting on for a century now. The moon hangs there in the sky, and below it, we see a glittery reflection path in the water ... Beautiful of course, but ... kind of cliché by now.

Now it wouldn't be so bad for me to make a print like that - after all, although the design may be a bit hackneyed, it could still be 'beautiful', and I'm sure that's what the collectors want. But I'm thinking that I can take a bit of a different approach, and have an idea in mind ...

But - I don't want to show or talk about this before it's done. I want the collectors to pick up the book, read the story first, and then turn the final page of the book to see the print in context!

So for this print - and I think for this print only - I'm going to keep the curtains closed on the production process. Only after the books have been shipped, and I know that they have been received, will I put the web page up for everybody to see.

Whether or not this print will be successful is far from clear to me just yet, but anyway, this is how we're going to play this one. I ask everybody to please be patient, and I hope that you will understand when you see the finished version!

[Added later] The thread continued here ...

Posted by Dave Bull at 9:11 AM | Comments (8)