As pointed out by Serge in the comments to the previous post, our picture is one portion of the 'Papermakers' page from the book 'Shokunin Burui', illustrated by Tachibana Minko and published originally in 1770.

My friend book-dealer Shingo Ueda has a couple of copies of the book, and lent me one of them for my work. I'll keep it handy by my bench while carving, so that I can refer to it as I go along.

As the key block gets near completion it will be time to make a fairly big decision - just how far to reproduce the original while making this print. It's a big decision because the original book is not printed in colours.

Eh? But here it is ... there are clearly colours.

Hah. I said it was not printed in colours. This is an example of 'kappa-zuri' - colouring with stencils. The colours were applied by hand using a couple of different techniques; either simply painted on through a stencil mask, or blown on, to create gradations.

Whether or not I will attempt those techniques, or use a normal printing technique, I haven't yet decided ...