Anyway, the blocks were finally 'finished' a couple of weeks back, and since then, I've been playing around with them, trying this and that, generally getting familiar with how they work together.

This is a block set that would be very suitable for one of those experiments where the same blocks could be used to make a series of completely different prints - early morning, deep midnight, etc. etc. I don't have the freedom to do that (right now), as the scene is basically set; this is supposed to be the view I see when emerging from my tent in the pre-dawn mist. Here's the quote from the story at the point where the image comes in:

"But I'm pretty much wide awake now, and although I do lie back on the mat in my comfortable bag, the sky is starting to show a faint light, and soon the birds are chirping their welcome to the new day. There's not much else for it but to obey their call, and get going on the day's activities. I slip my clothes on and step outside. It's quite misty; the trees immediately around me are clearly visible, but those just a short distance away are blurred, and behind those the forest fades into shadows. The pre-dawn air is of course still quite chilly, and damp with dew. A bit of a heavier sweater would have been a better choice to bring along on this trip, but as I know the day will warm up once the sun gets a chance to work its magic, it's not a problem ..."

So anyway, I've got some stuff to show. None of these are 'the print', as I am still not satisfied with what has come off the blocks so far, and have more tests planned, but they should still be interesting for people to peruse.

It's also worth noting that none of these were intended as 'prints', in the sense of 'finished' works. I really play around with these sample sheets as I am making them. I run a few sheets at a time, and even if I may think "Hmm, that sky looks pretty good," I will still put a sky that is 'too dark' on the next sheet, simply to see what it looks like, or that sheet may get an experimental version of a tree trunk, or whatever.

So here's a selection from the different proof runs made over the past couple of weeks. The earliest ones are kind of gloomy, and since then I've been trying to work out how the light should spill out into the image ... I'd be interested to hear what people think of these ...

That's the good news. The 'bad news' is that this is a Japanese-language site. English readers already have pretty good access to my work through the woodblock.com site, but development of the Japanese site has fallen far behind in recent years, and now catches up.

But anybody is free to visit - even if you can't read anything ... lots of 'pretty pictures'!

Anyway, apologies for the procrastination on putting something here. Let's try to make up for it today!

First, let's deal with the 'bad' news - I don't have anything I can show you to give you a good clear idea of what the print will look like. This one will have no key block at all, and the print will be made up of multi-layering of colour blocks. So there is no actual 'drawing' as such, to reproduce here.

I myself can refer to a Photoshop mock-up I have made, with those layers stacked up and tinted in an attempt to get a handle on what the result will be like, but I really don't want to put that image here. Simply it would give everybody the wrong idea about what to expect. The Photoshop construction is just a tool to help me move along the progress - it isn't what the print will 'look like'.

But I have no problem with showing you the blocks themselves ... you can then do exactly the same thing that I am currently doing - study them and try to get a handle on what colours/gradations/etc. to use when I finally sit down with the printing tools.

So here is a series of small snapshots of the block set as it currently stands, partway through the carving. Let's look at them in order of their 'position' in the image, starting with the most distant, and coming forward step by step ...

Nothing much to see on the first block - it will be used for a background flat printing (nothing carved yet):

Moving forward, in the middle distance, will be a group of trees ...

Those trees will have texture - not strong, because they are also misty, but more than the distant trees, which are just outlines:

And the texture has a second level ... (this is the block I am carving just now ...)

Moving still closer towards the viewer, there is a quite large tree in that plane:

... and it has a companion:

These trees have been 'moved'. The taller thinner one has 'walked' a short distance down the mountainside to take up a stance overlooking my campsite, and the fatter one has really made tracks - he actually lives on a mountain in Hakone!

These trees have texture - more detailed than the ones behind them:

And the texture has texture ...

Coming to the foreground, these trees are standing on a mossy bank (no carving started here yet):

And that will be multi-layered and textured ... but until I get the base layer worked out, I can't see yet what will happen on top of it.

If I had nothing else to do, I think carving could be done in another week or so, but that's not the case. I have a huge website job in the works (opening in the first week of April), and am burning the candles at both ends this month.

Keep watching the webcam, and I'll post another update here when there is something substantial to show.

Thanks for watching!

Here you go! The Woodblock Widget is now available for download:

The Widget - easily loaded into the system Dashboard - shows a small image and description of the most recent print, and is of course 'clickable' to take you directly to the appropriate page of the website. It updates each time a new print appears on the site.

And of course ... it's a free download! Get it from here, or directly from the Apple Widget Website.

Step #19 - Again re-using one of the earlier blocks, a thin layer of blue helps push the stones under the water ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #21 - A bit of rough carving, to give more texture to the underwater stones:

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #22 - And a bit more water over the top of them ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #23 - And here we are - a re-do of the base tone block for the stones, to darken them a bit ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Now that we've come all the way, I've put up the slideshow version of this process ...

Is this the only print that could be made from this set of blocks? Not at all ... this one has pretty much infinite variations possible. It would be fun to play with them and see what else could be done, but such experiments will have to wait for 'another day' ...

Step #14 - A simple gradation at the bottom of the stones makes them 'disappear' off the edge of the print ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #16 - The two stones need to be pushed apart, and a couple of small gradations will do the job ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #17 - This is the last impression on the foam area ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #18 - Back to the underwater stone, using the same block as Step #15 above ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 10] ...

Step #9 - Here's the fourth level of water, and something a bit different starts to happen - I'm leaving a 'bald' patch in the impression. This of course is where the underwater stone will go. This same block will come into play twice more, once for the stone, and then with blue to cover it, but I want to be able to control the levels separately ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #11 - Then back to the water, for the next level of tone. Again, the underwater stone area will be done separately later:

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #12 - Over to the foam, for the next level ... Keep moving around the print, never allowing any given area to get too saturated ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #13 - And here we go, the same block used in Step #9, with a brown gradation ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 9] ...

Step #4 - Back to the water for the next level of tone. Same colour exactly - just there are a few cut-outs here and there, which you can see better if you click for the enlargement.

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #6 - Back to the water, for the next level. The colour now is changing slightly, with a tad more yellow mixed into the blue, to give a more greeny feel ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #7 - Over to the stones again, for a splash of mossy dapple ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #8 - Time to move over to the untouched top area of the print, with a base tone for the tumbling foam ...

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 8] ...

So with the annual exhibition now out of the way, it's time to get back to work! There are 112 sheets in the stack for this batch; this will be the first run, to be followed by another batch of 112 later. Here are the first steps:

Step #1 - Here's the blank sheeet, ready to begin. There is no blank 'beta-ban' for this print, as I want to preserve the body of the paper in the area of tumbled foam.

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

Step #3 - Rather than put the next colour onto the water, it's best to keep moving around the print, to avoid saturating the paper in any given area. Next up will be the base tone on the foreground stone:

That impression by itself (on scrap paper ...) :

It's been a busy couple of weeks ... proofing work, mixed with all kinds of preparation for the upcoming exhibition.

Proofing for this one - a bit to my surprise - has proceeded without too much frustration. Experience counts for something, I guess, because it came out very close to what I had been anticipating. I made a few versions, some with deeper water tones, and tried some variations here and there, but these are just kind of 'tweaking' - the basic image came out very well. Here she is!

I'm now going to put all workshop work on hold for a couple of weeks. The next week will be devoted to publicity and construction work for the exhibition, which begins on the 20th. Once the show is over, on the 26th, I'll be getting down into the workshop to make the edition.

This gap - of more than two weeks - between proofing and editioning, is very unusual for me, as there simply is never any time for such a luxury. But this gives you your chance ... take a look at the print (an enlargement is available over on the Solitudes page), and feel free to send suggestions on how this can be improved before I start 'real' printing!

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 6] ...

One person in particular - Gary Luedtke - spent quite a bit of time on his version (which is on that page), and recently sent me an improved version:

Well ... seems he can't 'sit still', and now that winter is here, he has pulled out the same image, and had a go at updating it for the season!

Two more to come later, Gary?

Spent the last couple of days working on the flowing water blocks ... and they're nearly done; it's gone much faster than I thought it would!

As I mentioned earlier, I'm planning six blocks for this part of the print - a variety of cool blues / greens which will overlap to hopefully produce some nice depth in the water, along with the feeling of the water rushing along.

As usual, there is a 'base' tone. This will be used to print the lightest shade - quite a light blue - and then perhaps used again later for mura-bokashi (gradations printed from uncarved block areas ...). Here is the block for this; there are only a few small areas cut out of it, these will end up as the natural paper colour ... 'highlights' in the water:

And now, before I show you the next block, there is something else to show you ... something that has never appeared on my carving bench before, not once in all the years that I have been making woodblock prints!

Wood shavings, of course .... But my desk is usually covered with shavings, no? Yes, indeed ... but never of this small 'curly' type before. Recognize what type of tool was used to produce them?

When we move in a bit, we can see that the cutting work isn't quite finished on this block yet. As before, I'll be waiting until after some test printing before doing any more on it, but you can see the areas where the wood will be cut into more ragged shapes, rather than being left as smooth lines.

But about the V-gouge ... Yes, it's true that I've never used one before. Traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking used neither 'V' nor 'U' gouges; all cutting was done with the knife, with wider chisels then being used to clear away the un-needed waste wood. When sosaku printmaking came into being at the beginning of the 20th century, those guys used whatever tools they felt appropriate, and V and U gouges were certainly among them. But because I've only ever made reproductions of old-style prints, I've never needed those before.

(Actually, that's not 100% true. A few years back, when I was working on the Surimono Album print series, I picked up a small 'U' gouge to cut the water pattern on the reproduction I made of a Hiroshi Yoshida print. It was the only way to reproduce the appearance of the original print ... use the same tool that they must have used.)

And in fact, I don't even have a V-gouge! To do this job this afternoon, I used a horrible piece of cheap student junk that I picked up from the stationery store (school supplies).

I'm sure my 'normal' tools are embarrassed to be seen next to it; I'll have to get a 'real' one next time I'm downtown ...

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 5] ...

Nearly a week since the previous update on the carving process ... It hasn't been a full seven days of carving though; I took a day off with Sadako, wrote the winter issue of the newsletter, sent out a bunch of media flyers for the upcoming exhibition, did a bit of year-end cleanup, and ... spent a day downtown on miscellaneous things, including a live interview on NHK national radio ...

I've now got the blocks finished for the large rock in the bottom left corner, and for the foamy area at top left. Three pieces of wood ... two sides each. Here they are on the bench ...

And let's zoom in a bit, to see what some of those 'dots' look like:

Actually, there will still be a bit more work on these blocks, but I can't do it until after some test printing. You can see in this image that the 'dots' are all produced from quite sharp cuts. This wouldn't look very natural in the finished print, so I'll be taking a knife to them and knocking off a bunch of the sharp points, and roughening up many of the edges. But it's better to wait and see what the overall appearance is, before messing around with them too much at this point ...

And here's a closeup ... (click for enlargement)

Next job in line will be the six faces that will cover the flowing water part of the image ...

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 4] ...

Lots of carving done the past couple of days ... It always takes a bit of time to get back in the groove again; unlike 'real' carvers who do nothing but this every day, I lose a lot of my touch for this job during the weeks of printing and other work ...

I'm trying something a bit different for parts of this print. When I was involved with the production of the Aspen Grove print for Mokuhankan last year, I was quite intrigued by the set of blocks that Mike created for it. He used Photoshop to break a photographic image into tone levels, and then used a computer-controlled tool to cut the resulting patterns onto a set of woodblocks, like this:

Now, I'm not interested in making a print that looks just like a photograph, nor having it cut by a machine, but I thought this idea of tonal breakdown was something worth playing with, so I took a photograph of the stone in this design and broke it down into levels. Mike used eight levels for his photograph of that grove of trees, but I just used four for this stone. I also did the same thing for the zone of splashing foam, and then put the Photoshop output onto a set of four sheets of thin paper to see if they looked 'carveable'. Here's one of them ...

Whoo-hee! Look at all those little black dots! What do you think?

And here ... after pretty much a full day of work at it, is the block that matches that image. (The stone and the foam will of course be printed in different colors; they simply share the same piece of wood because there is enough distance between them ...)

So one down, three to go! (But I do have to admit that more than once during this endless - and kind of 'mindless' - process, I've asked myself "Is spending so much time sitting at my bench cutting tiny little dots really a sensible way to use so much of my precious time on this planet?)

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 3] ...

The design for this one may come as a bit of a surprise to some people; I have learned from correspondence during the past few months, that many people seem to have the idea that there are only to be three designs in this series, with the same landscapes appearing in different seasons. Now that's not a bad idea for an intellectual and design challenge, but I felt that for a multi-year project like this, the collectors (and I) need a bit more varied 'content'. So there will be 12 very different designs overall.

We saw a very peaceful corner of the river back in summer. Let's look at another aspect of it this time:

Now this isn't a photo of my actual camping spot - this was taken a short distance upstream. But it does serve to give another view of what this river looks like ... a very steep valley and a rough landscape. I'm standing at least four meters above the water, and look at that trash caught up in the tree branches on the right! This is not a place you want to be after a major storm comes through!

After a few hours of poking around at the water's edge, and getting my feet plenty wet jumping and slipping around on the rocks, I came across this little scene:

Rock ... smooth water ... white water ... and a good bit of 'energy' as the water slides down that little 'chute'. I think there might be an interesting print 'hiding' here ...

I took some snapshots, and then returned to my desk, and started to fool around, trying to frame it in the best way to catch the dynamism of the moving water. I think I managed to come up with something, but it's going to be difficult to show you ... yet.

The previous three prints in this series all had pretty understandable 'key' blocks. There was one block - printed in dark pigment - that carried lines that formed the boundaries of the different colour areas of the print. This image will be different. There will be no key block as such.

During the time that I am carving, there will be no way for you to 'see' pieces of the puzzle coming together. The blocks - for the most part - are just going to seem like random shapes and patterns. But once they are all done, and a multi-layer printing is done from them, I'm hoping we'll have an interesting print!

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the only one of the blocks that will have any lines at all, so let's call this the 'key' block:

I think you can recognize the stone in the lower left corner; as for the rest ... well, stay tuned!

The thread continues in [River in Winter - 2] ...