In the 'old days' the process of course started with sketches and drawings provided by the artist, but in the case of making a reproduction, the starting point is an existing print. Using a modern colour copy machine, I enlarged the print by 400% onto a series of overlapping sheets. The original is visible at the left.

I then took each of the sheets to my light table, and with a series of pens and 'fude' brushes, carefully traced each line of the design onto a thin type of Japanese paper known as 'gampi'. At this point, the coloured parts of the print were ignored, it is just the lines of the key block that I traced. I made every attempt to reproduce the 'character' of the original brush strokes.

For a left-handed person to reproduce calligraphy originally drawn by a right-hander is difficult. You can see here where I had to cut and insert an additional piece of tracing paper, for a second attempt ... When I had finished tracing everything to my satisfaction, I took the patchwork of traced sheets back to the copy machine, and reduced them 50% (halfway back to the original size). I then reassembled the picture and made the final 50% reduction directly onto delicate 'minogami' paper. This will become the 'hanshita', the sheet that will be pasted onto the wood.

The woodblock that I will use for this print is yamazakura (Japanese mountain cherry), but even though this is a very hard and dense wood, it is not quite dense enough for the fine carving that will be necessary for the poem on this print. So at that particular place on the wood surface I have inlaid some tsuge (boxwood). I chiseled out a hole, and prepared a couple of pieces of wood to fit (Boxwood trees are very small, and I couldn't obtain a single piece wide enough to fit, so I made the inlay from two smaller pieces.)

After everything was ready, I glued the inlay in place, clamping it down so that it wouldn't warp upwards with the moisture from the glue. When it was dry, I planed it down flush with the surface of the main block.

I then spread glue over the wood surface, and lay the hanshita face down in place. You can see where the poem lines up with the inlaid piece of boxwood ...

The 'patchy' appearance is due to the fact that while the paper was still moist from the glue, I gently rubbed it with a fingertip and peeled away the paper in those places:

It seems quite impossible when one first tries it, but it is actually possible to remove almost the entire body of the paper, leaving nothing but the lines themselves in place on the wood surface. Rub a tiny bit too hard, or a tiny bit too long, and you lose everything ...

... but rub 'just right', and the design is clear and sharp, ready for carving. If some 'white' paper patches remain here and there, they can be rendered transparent with a miniscule application of camellia oil on a cotton swab.

The carving of any traditional Japanese woodblock print starts with the outlines. The tool used is the 'hangi toh' (or 'ko-gatana' - small sword - as the older carvers call it). The blade of this tool is made from two layers of steel laminated together - one hard and brittle (to make the cutting edge), and the other softer and more flexible (to provide the support necessary to avoid breakage.) All the outlines are cut with this one tool, and no other knives or chisels will be touched until this outline cutting is done over the entire area of the design.

One knife blade doesn't last very long; usually just a couple of months.I keep the same handle of course, just slipping in new blades as needed.

The cutting knife is of course quite fine, and the lines it incises are somewhat difficult to see. The small triangles cut out here and there show those places where two cut lines meet. These triangles are cut away because the clearing tools to be used later will not fit into those corners. In some places - between closely spaced lines - long thin slivers of wood have already 'popped out' ...

The body of the crow will be left on this block, but the black you will see there in the final print will come from an additional 'tsuya' (shiny black) block that will be overprinted on top of it.

Here's a close-up of the 'pine needle' clusters - all still done using just the same tool ... That 'blank' space you see in this photo just under the horizontal tree branch will be cut away later with the 'aisuki' chisels. You can see in a couple of spots where the paper has peeled away as I cut into it. This is common with very delicate work, no matter how well one pastes down the hanshita. It's actually not a problem, because once one side of any line is cut, you then know where the other side should be, and having the paper lifted out of the way sometimes makes it easier to see where you are going ...

I've 'knocked off' the very tip of the knife by rubbing the back side of the knife with a few strokes on one of the sharpening stones. I did this 'temporarily', for the job of carving the 'wiggly' and rough outlines of the tree branches. The knife must turn this way and that as it moves along the wood, and if I left the tip in its delicately pointed shape, it would soon break off. Knocking off the tip like this avoids a lot of resharpening. For carving the calligraphy of the poem (visible in the background) I will need the full natural point, and will sharpen it that way at that time.

I guess with a photo like this you can get an idea of the scale of this work. Actually, this is a photo of carving the 'title' of the print - the poem is written with even smaller characters ...

I don't try to do this with the naked eye. I have a lens on an arm that extends over my desk and I look down through it at the block. I don't know what the carvers in 'the old days' did - when did lenses and spectacles first start to be used? It seems difficult to conceive of them doing it without such aids.

When carving characters like this, there is absolutely no 'strength' needed; the blade is only inserted a fraction of a millimetre into the wood, and then slices - and that is the appropriate verb, not 'cuts' - its way along the lines. Only the tiniest wiggle of the wrist is needed to take it around the curves of the line.

Here's a bit of one of the poems, with a millimetre ruler for scale ... Although I think I'm pretty close to the shape of the original characters, I really won't be able to tell until I've done some test printing. Once I can then see the result, I will return to the block and trim off some lines that may be a bit thick, or round off some corners that are too 'sharp'.

This particular piece of boxwood isn't as fine as I had hoped it would be. It was sold to me as a piece of Mikurajima tsuge - boxwood from Mikura Island; this wood is reputed to be the finest boxwood, and has been used for centuries for making ultra-fine wooden combs. I'm not about to pretend to you that I can tell from looking at this wood just what island the tree was growing on, but there are those who apparently can ...

It's not that this piece isn't hard enough, that it certainly is; I broke the knife many times while carving this poem. The problem is that once the carving was done, and the paper was being washed off, the wood absorbed the water too readily and some of the thin lines have expanded in width - not a great deal, but enough to spoil their character. I will have to trim them down after seeing the test printing. This wood isn't quite as hard and dense as I would like it to be. Back to the woodyard for next time ...

Once the outlines are finished, the hangito will not be used again on this block. Note that only those lines which will print in black on the finished print have been cut. The two uncut patterned areas you see in this photograph will be cut later on one of the colour blocks. (If I were working from an original artist's drawing, I would have to make sure that I had traced a copy of such patterns onto a separate hanshita, in order that they not be 'lost'. But as I do have an original here for reference, I can simply ignore them at this stage.)

For clearing the 'waste' on this block, I use two chisels - a 15mm asa marunomi (shallow 'U-shaped' chisel), and a 24mm hiranomi (wide flat clearing chisel). These tools are both used with a hammer or mallet.

It is difficult to see in the photo, but there is a 'bench dog' on the carving bench, against which the block rests while the 'banging' is going on. The block is not clamped in place, but must be free to turn this way and that, as the wood grain of this cherry is quite convoluted in places, and one must frequently rotate the block and work from the reverse direction to avoid splintering out the wood.

Just how close to the carved lines to go is a matter of skill - and bravado! The more wood one can remove at this stage, the less work will be needed at the next step - but a tiny bit too far, and you are looking at a time-consuming repair job.

Because people are 'watching' this time, I think I'll stay on the safe side, and not tempt fate by going too close ...

The third stage in cutting the keyblock is removing those last little areas of waste left bordering the lines. This is done with the family of flat chisels known as aisuki. I used five of them on this block: 6mm, 3mm, 1mm, .5mm, .Xmm (that smallest one is just a 'point', used for prying out waste in very small spaces).

In addition to this clearing, I also use the largest of these aisuki chisels for running over the places scooped out by the marunomi to trim down any lines and striations left behind. This isn't absolutely necessary, but I like to have a clean and smooth-looking block (and it does actually help the printing process go smoothly, as the pigment builds up on such striations and sometimes causes blots on the paper.)

So here's the finished key block, freshly cut, and with the left-over remnants of the hanshita paper washed off. The next step will involve smearing black ink all over it, and I always feel a bit of a sad twinge whenever I do that - these blocks are like sculptures, and I'd like to be able to leave it in this beautiful 'natural' condition ...

Using a very light sumi ink, I 'pulled' a number of prints from the key block, on a lightweight 'hodomura' paper. I made as many of these as I expect there to be colour blocks (plus a couple of extra for insurance ...).

I then sat down with a fluorescent marker, and 'coloured in' on each sheet the areas where the wood is to remain untouched on that block. There are to be eight colour 'blocks' for this print (clockwise from top left in this photo):

• a pale sky
• decorative strips hanging from the shrine archway
• sun / brown tree branches (sharing the same block)
• shrine archway
• green pine needles
• black crow body
• 'karazuri' (embossing) for feather patterns

Here's a closeup of one of the sheets (which are known as 'kyogo'). The yellow of course has no connection at all with the colour that will appear there in the final print; I chose it simply because it is an easy-to-see shade.

These kyogo are then pasted down on some fresh blocks. Because two of them (the ones that will print the crow's body and the embossing for the feathers) only use a very small part of the block surface, I managed to 'squeeze' them both onto one surface, pasting them down heads-and-tails. In this way, the seven sheets go on three pieces of wood (using both sides ...)

Here are the finished colour blocks, with the paper not yet washed off. I started in the morning, and worked through the day, but wasn't quite able to finish the last one that evening. It was finished off this morning. There is nothing carved on the reverse side of the key blocks (to maintain a solid thickness to avoid warping on this critical block), but the colour blocks are carved on both sides.

If they should warp a bit, that can be corrected during the printing process by using warm water and a towel applied to the concave surface ...

Can you also see (top right) the block with the two colour areas carved on it ... heads and tails?

Printing has now begun. This is the block for the dark green pine needles. Notice that because the pigment is mostly transparent, the colour of the wood shows through quite a lot. It's almost impossible to tell by looking at this just what colour will appear on the print, where rather than a 'woody coloured' background showing through the pigment, there will be the white background of the paper.

The printing 'formula' is straightforward: place a dab of paste on the wood, follow it with a smear of pigment, then mix them together with the brush (as in the photo). When they are well mixed and spread evenly over the carved surfaces, make a few gentle strokes to remove the brush marks.

Lay the paper in place face down on the block. (This actually takes two hands, not one, but I had to hold the camera!) My thumb is covering the point where the corner of the paper has slipped into the L-shaped registration mark.

Note also how much of the pigments are showing through to this, the reverse surface of the print. The pressure of the baren really drives the paste/pigment mixture right up in between the fibres of the paper. I am using pretty thick paper for this print (to get a good embossing), but the pigment still 'fills it up' like this.

The motion is 'small tight circles', with the baren also moving in wider pattern so that the entire area of this particular block is covered. It's pretty firm pressure, and when you consider that this paper is wet, it's amazing that it doesn't collapse under the rubbing.

The paper is kept moist throughout the entire printing process. If dry paper was used, the pigments simply wouldn't be driven into the body of the paper properly. It's also important for the registration: dry paper would expand as it absorbed the wet pigment, and subsequent blocks wouldn't register properly.

The final block is a 'karazuri' (empty printing) of the feather pattern. The block is used with no pigment or paste at all. I rub with the baren first the emboss the lines strongly into the paper, and then rub with my finger to cause the body of the crow to 'stand out' even more (which makes this technically a 'kimedashi', not a karazuri).

It hasn't been trimmed yet (actually it's still wet!), but here's a snapshot of the finished print. I think it has turned out quite well. Compared to the original, it's quite a bit 'bright' and 'hard', but the only thing that will help that is the passage of time ... I think about a hundred years or so should do it ...

I've sometimes considered artificially aging my prints, tinting the paper to give it a brownish tone, or even actually 'beating' the paper to give it the softness that comes when the sizing has 'flown away' with the passage of time, but I've resisted doing such things. They might help enjoyment of the print now, but they would make it worse at some point down the road. I think it's better just to wait ... My grandchildren will enjoy it more than I can!

Here's a close-up ... the white 'clouds' are untouched paper. You can see just how much pressure was used on the baren. The paper in the deep red area has been almost completely flattened. As time goes by, it will recover somewhat, but the embossing effect will never disappear completely.

Embossing like this is one of the hallmarks of Edo-era surimono. An exceptionally thick paper was usually used (even thicker than the one I'm using here), and the prints really do become three dimensional objects.

I sometimes joke with interviewers and describe myself as a sculptor, not a printmaker, and I'm only half kidding!

This was a tough part - a 'graduated' embossing. Too much pressure when printing the faint background sky colour would have killed the embossing of the lettering. But too little would have meant that the clouds didn't stand out clearly ...

Thanks for following me through this process. I hope you've enjoyed watching over my shoulder while I made this print. Even after nearly twenty years of doing this, I still get a kick out of making a pile of these things!

And now it's time for me to get started on the first print in the new 'Surimono Albums' series - an image from the Hokusai Manga.

Note (added a few years later): For those who are interested, this print is now available from my Mokuhankan publishing venture.