Posted by Dave Bull at 2:53 AM, September 20, 2011 [Permalink]

After a full long weekend's worth of trimming, checking, signing, sealing, mat printing, mounting, and wrapping, Mystique #16 has now left the building ...

Because my 'wrapping lady' Ichikawa-san is having a difficult time caring for an elder relative these days - causing some shipping delays recently - I did all these jobs myself this time. So if your print is mounted upside-down or something, you know who to blame!

Here's a scan of the finished version:

As you can see, there are rather a lot of small gradations on this one (click to bring up an enlargement, and look at the outlines of the fruit, for example), and even now, I can't actually describe how many 'impressions' there are on it, as I 'bunched up' the gradations while printing, doing a few of them at a time ...

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I think that compared to the original Chinese version from around 400 years ago, this one is more vibrant and 'solidly' printed, as opposed to the more vague 'watery' feeling that many of the pages of the original book have. And my printing is 'cleaner', with fewer visible brush strokes and other 'evidence' of how it was made ...

But that's my taste!

Following comment posted by: Tom Kristensen on September 20, 2011 11:14 PM

Sweet work, a lovely bunch of persimmons.

Following comment posted by: Dave on September 21, 2011 8:53 AM

Thanks Tom! Have to add though, there is a lot of doubt about the 'diagnosis' as persimmon. Although the overall shape (with vague segmenting visible) does seem persimmon-like, the leaves are totally different, as is the method of joining to the stem.

Persimmons have a cluster of leaves at the joint, but the fruits in this image are joined in a very apple-like way.

The book from which I took the image uses the term 'mandarins', but the leaves of that fruit are very thin, and taper to quite a sharp point, completely different from the ones here.

So when it came time for me to create colours, I put aside these confusions and just did what 'looked nice', but I very much doubt that my colours are biologically accurate ...

Following comment posted by: Gary Luedtke on September 29, 2011 12:34 PM

Looks like tomatoes to me, but what do I know? :)