A children's book inspired by Japanese colour woodblock prints

Ukiyo-e arose in the seventeenth century in Edo, today's Tokyo. The city was growing, its merchants had money and leisure, and they wanted pictures of what surrounded them: theatre, fashion, pleasure quarters and, later, landscapes. The woodblock is the printing technique here, ukiyo-e the pictorial tradition that used it over the centuries. Because the pictures were printed, many people could buy the sheets: according to the Asian Art Museum, one set of blocks yielded several thousand impressions.

A classic print was a joint effort. The publisher carried the project: he assessed the market, commissioned the artist, oversaw production and took care of distribution. The artist drew the design in black ink on thin paper. The carver transferred the drawing to a block of cherry wood and cut the wood away around the lines. Last of all, the printer put the colours on the paper. The artist took no part in the printing itself, and some things about the result were only decided in the workshop.

For a multicoloured sheet, a nishiki-e, a separate block was cut for each colour. Small registration marks, kento, held the paper in the same place on every pass so that lines and areas of colour lay exactly on top of one another. According to the Asian Art Museum, an average sheet needed at least about ten impressions. The registration marks became a reliable technique from the middle of the eighteenth century, and Suzuki Harunobu introduced full-colour printing around 1765.

In the nineteenth century, landscape moved to the centre. Katsushika Hokusai had his series Fugaku sanjūrokkei printed in the early 1830s, the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which later grew to 46 sheets. In it he made extensive use of Prussian blue, a pigment that had reached Japan from Europe only shortly before. Utagawa Hiroshige made the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Not only single sheets were printed but also books: ehon, the Japanese word for picture book, means in the narrower sense the woodblock-printed volumes of the Edo period. The Smithsonian Libraries hold over a thousand such volumes, many with pictures by Hokusai and Hiroshige. Hokusai's Hokusai manga comprises fifteen volumes published in Nagoya between 1814 and 1878.

What Sagalino makes of this is a present-day interpretation. Our pictures are made digitally as a single image, not from separate printing blocks printed over one another colour by colour. What we have taken over are the design features of the tradition: dark outlines, calm areas, layered planes, wave lines and a palette from indigo to rust red. Wood grain and paper fibre are imitated as surface texture. That is why the style is called “inspired by ukiyo-e”.