With the Surimono Albums under way through 1999, I was very much enjoying my 'new' life as a printmaker. The daily routine was no different from what it had been during the ten-years of creating prints based on Shunsho's old designs, but the content was so different!

Each month was a new adventure, and a new challenge, as I was now completely free to incorporate many of the interesting techniques used over the centuries. One of these was karazuri, which we usually translate as 'embossing', although strictly speaking it is more of a 'debossing' approach.

When it was time to get the New Year print ready for 2000, it didn't take me long to find a suitable idea (using this Koryusai design from my growing collection of antique prints).