Posted by Dave Bull at 2:40 AM, March 14, 2010
So nice to be carving boxwood again! The work went very quickly today; I began by cutting out all the 'easy' parts of that block - the outlines - then cleared it all off before beginning the calligraphy.
And here is the finished block, after taking a trial impression for checking and adjusting:
Here are those first two blocks:
Those blocks are cut on a fairly hard cherry, but as the back sides were much softer, I used those for blocks that will be used to print plain colour. You can see where I ended up splitting some of the wood, and exposing the underlying plywood base. This is an 'unhappy' batch of wood (as I mentioned in a post a few days ago). Matsumura-san had them planed by a new craftsman he had found, and this guy isn't very good. That particular block has a cherry layer now only about 2~3mm thick, and it's pretty obvious what happened while he was planing it ... he just kept digging deeper and deeper trying to get rid of chips and scratches in the surface.
Anyway, that's the first stage finished - these are the blocks that will be used to print the outlines and decorative borders on all the prints in this series. Next step - starting tomorrow morning - the block set for the first print pair ...
