Update to yesterday's post about the flooded prints ...
I overlooked mentioning something in yesterday's post about the flooded home of one of my collectors.
I linked to a YouTube video of the damage, and that slideshow has a piano music soundtrack. One of yesterday's readers asked about it, and in the process of looking up the answer, I discovered that the pianist is Ushiro-san's son, and that he has a YouTube channel.
If you enjoyed the music yesterday, please have a listen!
Katsushi-san can handle English, so if you like what you hear, please consider dropping him a comment on his page there ...
Everybody has heard of course about the huge triple disaster that hit this country last spring - the earthquake, tidal wave, and nuclear plant problems - but not too many overseas friends heard about the 'second wave' of trouble we had last year.
A couple of major typhoons swept across many parts of the country, and these were of the 'once in a hundred years' type. Although not on the same scale as the devastation up north, they caused a huge amount of damage, and also many deaths.
As it happens, the village where my children's mother grew up was greatly affected, both by floods and landslides. One of my long-time collectors - Mr. Shigeyoshi Ushiro - lives there, and I wrote about him in a newsletter story many years ago, featuring the log house he was building at the time.
Well, I have sad news to report. His house - although built on what everybody thought to be completely safe ground, well up from the river - was flooded up to the second story. Pretty much everything inside was destroyed ...
He doesn't have any video of the event, but he took a number of photos, and threaded them into a slideshow he has uploaded to YouTube:
And at 4:19 in that video, press the pause button and take a look. Over at the left, sitting on top of a pile of stuff, is a small brown box with a print on top. Here's a screenshot:
Yes, Ushiro-san was able to report to me that the Mystique of the Japanese Print set has a 'feature' that I can't honestly say that I planned ... it floats.
The box was picked up from the desk by the rising water, and deposited there in the next room when the levels receded again. He says that the prints inside are fine, and that the one on display on top must have just sat there peacefully while the box sailed around the room.
The rest of the news is not so good. Ushiro-san has been collecting my prints since 1989, and has everything I have made. They were in two places: the '100 Poets' set was in a room upstairs, where it came through completely unscathed.
But all the rest - the Surimono Albums, the Beauties series, and everything else - were on shelves under the stairs. And no, they didn't float.
I've talked to Ushiro-san about replacing many of them from my 'overstock' here, but he has asked me to hold off 'for now'. He's not quite sure how he wants to proceed with his life from here on, and it sounds like he will be abandoning the log house, and returning to the city. He really doesn't seem to be in much of a mood to accumulate things just now. There isn't much I can do about it, but wait and see what he decides ...
In the previous post, I included four of the printing steps for this image, and today we'll have four more. Tomorrow? There is no tomorrow ... we're done!
You might have to hunt around on this one to see what has changed from the previous step. It's a light tone on the cushions, and also adds some 'highlights' on small elements like drawer handles, etc.:
And then a simple gradation out on the mountain, to bring it to life. Of course it's got to be snow-capped!
Next is a second application of the background tone in the cartouche box, to set it apart from the image itself:
And the final step is the same as with all prints in this series - the embossed pattern around the outer border:
And there we have it, a fairly quiet end to the series. When seen close at hand in natural light, this one is really quite beautiful!
Updates haven't been coming very regularly, but there is time for one tonight - printing has been underway for a couple of days, and there are a few stages to show.
I didn't actually catch the first one with the scanner, as it was just the blank beta block, to smooth the surface of the paper before doing the key block. Once that was in place, the key could go down:
The carving turned out pretty well I think. It would have been better to have used boxwood for this, but I didn't have a block this wide, and I don't want to take a chance using a jointed one, as the division would almost certainly show, if not immediately, then certainly after a few years has gone by. But the fine lines are there, and he even has rows of teeth ... (these images are all enlargeable.)
The key was followed later the same evening, with the first 'colour' block:
I use quotes around the word 'colour', because of course this print is going to be all done with tones of sumi ink, as was the original version.
That first tone used a faint green mixed with the sumi, and this next one uses a purple. Not sure how much of all this is going to be visible in these scans, but the collectors will see it, for sure!
That impression is most noticeable on the clothing, but it also covered the hibachi, and the wall on the right (with a gradation taking the colour out as we move upwards ...)
We then head outside, to put a gradation behind the mountain, making it stand out more clearly:
And it looks quite 'rich' already, even with only this minimum number of impressions done!
Mystique Series #18 : key done, and colours coming
The carving on the keyblock was done a few days ago, but other things intervened for a while, and it is only today that I have been able to get started on the colour blocks.
Here's a quick snapshot of the finished keyblock, before washing:
He turned out pretty well I think; after it was done I took a few proofs, and then - working under a strong lens - touched up some of the lines in places where they were not quite what they should be ... This is not the most dense wood, and I'm working pretty much at the limit of what it will allow without breaking down.
I did the colour transfers this morning. I say 'colour', but there will be nothing more than sumi used on this print. Colour will hopefully be found in the shades that I use ...
The last couple of days have seen plenty of progress on the keyblock carving of the Hokusai 'Fuji in the Window' image:
I have been much more careful with the sharpening than I have been in recent months/years (mostly due to the impetus from a very nice new knife blade I am testing for Sato-san), and it is showing ...
People living in Japan have all had the experience of walking down a quiet residential street and seeing a gardener at work in one of the trees in a nearby garden. He is usually sitting/standing up near the top of a large stepladder, and wielding a small clipper. One by one, he trims the needles from a large pine tree, until he gets the shape exactly right. All day long, clip ... clip ... clip ... And the pile of needles grows on the ground underneath him.
Planning a new series means thinking not just about prints and designs, but of course the peripheral materials too, including the storage system. The system I devised for the original Treasure Chest, which combined storage and display in one unit ...
... was very successful, and the case for the Mystique series grew out of the same concept.
Now if (heh!) I were to be making another set of prints on a similar scale - desktop display size - I would have to decide either to use one of those two case designs, or come up with something new. I was mulling these issues over while I was carving yesterday morning, and had an inspiration for a way to make a case similar to the current Mystique model - of course combining storage and display - but which moved it forward somewhat. Call it Mark II, if you will.
I thought about it off and on during the day, and after the evening carving session was done, even though it's really getting ahead of things, I couldn't resist having a go at building a sample. I didn't actually pull an 'all-nighter', but the sky was starting to get a bit light by the time I finished! Here are some photos of the results:
To start with, here's the case for the current Mystique series - made of light-weight paulownia wood, in a two-tone stain:
Most of you have seen how it works; the drawer slides open ...
... revealing the stack of prints inside, along with a wooden stand and an acrylic cover sheet:
With the stand in place, it all looks like this on your desktop:
And a very nice little item it has turned out to be. Although some people have expressed reservations at my choice of a two-tone finish, that is a trivial point. More credible reservations have been expressed about the drawer concept - it is difficult to open when you want to (you have to pick up the whole box to do so), and it tends to slide open unwantedly when you are moving the box around.
The new Mark II addresses these concerns. Rather than make this new sample from scratch, I started with one of the Mark I cases (a dented and scratched one), took a saw to it, and disassembled it into its component pieces. Here are the bits I then trimmed off and tossed aside:
... along with the shavings from planing other parts to a new dimension (paulownia planes like butter!):
I then re-assembled the components in a completely new way, and it now looks like this - quite similar on the outside:
Note that I don't have any of that same wood stain here, so these photos show white bare wood in the spots where I have cut and re-shaped the parts. If we do produce this thing, it will of course be stained and varnished properly (and probably no two-tone this time, I think).
Here's how it opens:
Isn't that nifty! It opens easily when you want it to, and yet will never open itself by accident! Once the wooden stand and acrylic sheet are in place, it looks similar to the original model:
Putting the two models side-by-side, you can see that the new one is more compact in both height and depth (the width is unchanged), and yet it is interchangeable with the same print mats, stand and acrylic cover as the Mark I.
And there are no more 'drawer' problems!
There is, however, one more major consideration. The workshop who produced the Mark I cases does not seem particularly interested in doing any more work for me (as in, they are not replying to my emails!). The margins were pretty thin for them last time (not only them!), and I guess I was pretty 'noisy' about the quality of the work. So I am facing the prospect of having to make these in house.
Now making 200 of these would be fun, for sure, but it would need a pretty major investment in tools and jigs (my own home-made table saw just doesn't have the tolerances necessary for this kind of work), not to mention the time it would take.
After more weeks 'off' than I care to think about, I got back to the bench this morning for the first carving on the final print in the Mystique series. Here's a Woodblock Webcam snapshot:
As you have seen from the images in the previous post, there is a fair amount of detail in this image, and most of the work will be done right down there at the tip of the blade - difficult for webcam viewers to see clearly I guess ...
Not directly related to the printmaking, but perhaps of interest ... A new 'tool' arrived at the workshop this morning:
It's an electricity monitor - that is going to help us track our usage more carefully. Here in Japan these days power supplies are quite tight due to the large number of reactors that have been taken off-line, and we're all being encouraged to control our usage as much as possible.
I'm actually not too much affected by this - my usage here is incredibly low as it is - but I'd still like to see where it can be reduced/controlled further, so I ordered this little meter that sits in the circuit and displays various data items on demand: watts being drawn at the moment, the cost on a per-day basis at that usage rate, and the accumulated KwH (and costs) since reset. It also has settings for CO2 usage, etc., but I don't think that is so useful.
This sort of information display should be built-in on all our major appliances, I think!
No, I don't mean 'tracing the progress', I mean 'progress of the tracing'!
Here's where I've got so far:
I 'lost' a few hours tracing time yesterday afternoon, because I went for 'a walk in the park'. Not for fun, for work! I have some ideas for the next print series - the one that will be starting up in April - and I needed to look at some things in Showa Memorial Park, a short train ride from here, to see if they would be useful in my planning ...
[Update: a few hours later ...]
[And this will be it for tonight ... not quite done ...]
I was talking with a fellow printmaker by Skype this morning, just as he approached the final minutes of his year (over in the US) and I was getting ready for New Year day lunch, and he asked "Where have you been? Are you OK?"
Well, I had thought that over the year-end period most people were probably too busy with their own affairs to concern themselves with printmaker's blogs or webcams, so I haven't been doing much updating during the past couple of weeks (although I have been on the webcam quite a bit, actually). But it doesn't mean that we haven't been busy!
There's more here waiting to post about than I possibly have time for ... Let's touch on a few of the main items ...
I posted yesterday over on the Mokuhankan Conversations about our Xmas year-end party, but I left out part of the story. There has been a lot of flu going around these days, and although most of the kids in our group have already had their taste of it - catching it at school or the daycare center - with the adults, it is a different story ...
Over the 24 hours following our party - which was held down in our workshop, with all of us stuffed together in the small space - nearly all of the adults (myself included) went down for the count, one by one. And it was a pretty bad flu, too. I wasn't able to eat or drink even as much as a mouthful of water for more than two days, and my weight dropped from its usual 63kg down to just under 60. No blog updates during that time!
After I was able to stand up again, I wasn't ready for much active work, so spent the next few days on some programming. About a half-year ago, I opened up the Mokuhankan web shop to include some prints and books by 'partners' - people who have interesting woodblock items, and who I trust to maintain a good level of quality in their offerings. Young printer - and now print dealer - Shingo Ueda has some items there, as does the Takumi printmaking workshop. But none of them know much about HTML coding or other web preparation, so they have had to wait for me to make pages for them, and I just haven't got the time to do that sort of thing. So I spent a couple of days coding a 'back end' for the Mokuhankan catalogue, through which they themselves will be able to upload items.
It works in a similar fashion to the software one uses to upload to eBay - they put in the data, locate the images on their computer, and then send it off.
My software gets it all organized, makes thumbnails, popup enlargements, etc., puts all the data into the database, goes 'out' to find current currency exchange values based on their required price, and then codes the HTML pages automatically. When I get the email notifying me of this upload, I login, check it all over, approve (or not!) the item, and if I choose to 'turn it on', a single click activates it in the catalogue.
Ueda-san used it the other day to upload a few new Koitsu prints [alternate web link], which I checked over, and then quickly approved and activated. This is going to be a huge timesaver, and looks as though it will really help us move forward on this part of our business!
And speaking of the Takumi workshop, I'll be writing about them in my next newsletter, so once I was able to move around freely, I made a visit to chat with them. Their building is not much to look at, for sure!
But when you look closer, you can see things in the window ...
And inside - what a treasure house! More about this later ...
What else has been taking up time here ...? Well, one day was a visit from a young craftsman who has some interesting thoughts on the steel with which our carving knives are made, and he brought over some sample blades which we 'cooked up' on my kitchen stove, but as he is not ready to make his endeavours public yet, he has asked me to refrain from blogging about it. More about this later ... (I hope!)
And ... I spent most of yesterday afternoon 'gardening' up on my rooftop!
Long-time readers of this RoundTable may remember this sort of photo, which comes around in spring:
Pretty, right?
Well, yes ... but there is an obvious downside to having green stuff grow all over your house, and I have been procrastinating for a few years now. This past summer though, during a storm one day, the combined forces of wind and rain tossed that wisteria around pretty roughly, and now - six months later, with all the leaves down, and the view clear - this is what I see from my upstairs balcony:
I don't much care about the gutter, as the rain can fall freely from the edge of the roof onto the ground below, but what isn't showing in that photo are the tendrils/branches that have climbed up onto the top of the roof itself, and which are insinuating themselves into any tiny crack they can find. If I don't get this thing cut back before spring comes, it's going to destroy my roof.
Now I've got a long ladder, but there is no force on this planet that will get me up onto that roof, so I'm going to attack it in two stages. I picked up a long-handled branch trimmer the other day, and have started to trim off what I can reach from the balcony and windows. Once I've cut back as much as I can, I'm going to call neighbour Abe-san - who works as a roofer - and he'll hop up there to clear off the rest. And once we've got it to that stage, I'll trim annually to keep it from going up there again ...
Let's see ... what else has been keeping me 'out of view' these past couple of weeks ... Oh yes, we have another (big) problem with the Mystique print cases!
That series has been rolling along very well; there are now 173 names on the subscriber list for it, which means that there are less than 30 sets left. These remaining sets will make their way out to good homes bit by bit as 'back issue' subscriptions come in. But when I got a new order a couple of weeks ago, and went upstairs to the storeroom to get the case and first print ready for shipping, I found that a number of the cases still left here have developed a discolouration on the front panel:
I right away contacted a few of the collectors to see if their cases demonstrated the problem, and all the replies came back negative. And as I have never had any reports of such a thing from the 'field' it seems that the problem may be something caused by the local storage circumstances here (this place can be pretty damp in summer), although my own case, on display here in my 'living room' is completely normal.
There is no way I can send these out, but I certainly can't afford to get 30 more made (nor would the maker accept such a small order anyway). So, I don't see any other solution than to get out some sandpaper, sand them down to bare wood, and then re-varnish the front face of each one.
But as I'm afraid of the problem coming back, even under fresh varnish, it would be better to stain the front panel a deeper tone, so that such discolouration won't cause future problems. So I've started testing ...
Always something ...
And finally ... (finally!) ... work has begun on tracing the hanshita for carving Mystique #18, which will be the final print in the series:
So there's the update ... apologies that I haven't been very 'visible', but it's not like I've been basking on the beach somewhere! (Hah! Fat chance!)
