Japanese Woodblock Printing

Last week I went to the Summer Art Experience run by the Artists Society of Canberra and for 5 days immersed myself in learning the Japanese way of creating woodblocks and printing them. It was a fantastic course and the two images here show my results. Marianne Courtenay was our tutor - her website is in the Links on this page. I have done courses in lino printing with her before and all have been excellent. The mountain view was done as a reduction woodblock print, whereas the leaves print was made with two woodblocks superimposed, one cut down to make the background and the other raised. As we were having a heatwave when making these prints and had the air conditioning on, it was quite challenging to keep the paper damp. We needed the humidity of Japan. I really liked using gouache as the paint medium rather than the oil based inks for lino which is much messier in cleanup. The Japanese method of registration was very interesting as we cut a Kento block to do this.