I linked to a YouTube video of the damage, and that slideshow has a piano music soundtrack. One of yesterday's readers asked about it, and in the process of looking up the answer, I discovered that the pianist is Ushiro-san's son, and that he has a YouTube channel.

If you enjoyed the music yesterday, please have a listen!

Katsushi-san can handle English, so if you like what you hear, please consider dropping him a comment on his page there ...

A couple of major typhoons swept across many parts of the country, and these were of the 'once in a hundred years' type. Although not on the same scale as the devastation up north, they caused a huge amount of damage, and also many deaths.

As it happens, the village where my children's mother grew up was greatly affected, both by floods and landslides. One of my long-time collectors - Mr. Shigeyoshi Ushiro - lives there, and I wrote about him in a newsletter story many years ago, featuring the log house he was building at the time.

Well, I have sad news to report. His house - although built on what everybody thought to be completely safe ground, well up from the river - was flooded up to the second story. Pretty much everything inside was destroyed ...

You might have to hunt around on this one to see what has changed from the previous step. It's a light tone on the cushions, and also adds some 'highlights' on small elements like drawer handles, etc.:

I didn't actually catch the first one with the scanner, as it was just the blank beta block, to smooth the surface of the paper before doing the key block. Once that was in place, the key could go down:

The carving turned out pretty well I think. It would have been better to have used boxwood for this, but I didn't have a block this wide, and I don't want to take a chance using a jointed one, as the division would almost certainly show, if not immediately, then certainly after a few years has gone by. But the fine lines are there, and he even has rows of teeth ... (these images are all enlargeable.)

Here's a quick snapshot of the finished keyblock, before washing:

He turned out pretty well I think; after it was done I took a few proofs, and then - working under a strong lens - touched up some of the lines in places where they were not quite what they should be ... This is not the most dense wood, and I'm working pretty much at the limit of what it will allow without breaking down.

I did the colour transfers this morning. I say 'colour', but there will be nothing more than sumi used on this print. Colour will hopefully be found in the shades that I use ...

Here are quick snaps of the five other blocks:

I have been much more careful with the sharpening than I have been in recent months/years (mostly due to the impetus from a very nice new knife blade I am testing for Sato-san), and it is showing ...

Planning a new series means thinking not just about prints and designs, but of course the peripheral materials too, including the storage system. The system I devised for the original Treasure Chest, which combined storage and display in one unit ...

... was very successful, and the case for the Mystique series grew out of the same concept.

Now if (heh!) I were to be making another set of prints on a similar scale - desktop display size - I would have to decide either to use one of those two case designs, or come up with something new. I was mulling these issues over while I was carving yesterday morning, and had an inspiration for a way to make a case similar to the current Mystique model - of course combining storage and display - but which moved it forward somewhat. Call it Mark II, if you will.

I thought about it off and on during the day, and after the evening carving session was done, even though it's really getting ahead of things, I couldn't resist having a go at building a sample. I didn't actually pull an 'all-nighter', but the sky was starting to get a bit light by the time I finished! Here are some photos of the results:

To start with, here's the case for the current Mystique series - made of light-weight paulownia wood, in a two-tone stain:

As you have seen from the images in the previous post, there is a fair amount of detail in this image, and most of the work will be done right down there at the tip of the blade - difficult for webcam viewers to see clearly I guess ...

Here's where I've got so far:

I 'lost' a few hours tracing time yesterday afternoon, because I went for 'a walk in the park'. Not for fun, for work! I have some ideas for the next print series - the one that will be starting up in April - and I needed to look at some things in Showa Memorial Park, a short train ride from here, to see if they would be useful in my planning ...

Well, I had thought that over the year-end period most people were probably too busy with their own affairs to concern themselves with printmaker's blogs or webcams, so I haven't been doing much updating during the past couple of weeks (although I have been on the webcam quite a bit, actually). But it doesn't mean that we haven't been busy!

There's more here waiting to post about than I possibly have time for ... Let's touch on a few of the main items ...

Here's the 'before' - taken a couple of days ago. Nice autumn colours we have right now!

The duct didn't work. As I wrote on a subsequent page back then: "The air duct was not so successful; it did pull a stream of air from the warm attic, but 12 meters is a _long_ way, and very little of the warmth made it to the bottom of the pipe. And what was worse, because the lower room was so cold, any moisture in that warmish air instantly condensed at the mouth of the pipe, and the room became damp. Cold is OK ... cold and damp is unbearable. So it stayed off. Perhaps in the future, once this room is properly insulated, thus negating the large temperature differential, it will be possible to move the air around without the condensation problem ... we'll have to wait and see."

Did you notice that phrase 'perhaps in the future'? Well, the future is here!

The basic reason for the failure of the original project had been the weakness of the fan that I had used. I should perhaps have searched for a stronger one, but the additional problem with the condensation - not to mention the lack of insulation in the lower room - combined to kind of kill my enthusiasm for it, and I just didn't bother.

But now that we have done most of the insulation, I have started to think about giving this another try, and hunted around for a reasonably priced strong fan. A chance comment by Sadako the other day, when she mentioned that she had been having trouble with a little leaf blower she was using in her garden, led me to search the 'net for other such products, and I found this on a Yahoo auction listing - a Ryobi 'blower':

It at first looked like nothing more than a little toy, but the specs said that it could move 3.5 cubic meters a minute (a lot of air!), with a pressure of over 5.5 kiloPascals (also pretty impressive). And it was cheap.

I say 'we', but I mean they! Printer trainees Tsushima-san and Ishigami-san set aside their barens today (and will again tomorrow) for a packing day. In recent months, I have been doing this job by myself, but that doesn't really make much sense, I think.

So although the three of us spent the day in the workshop together today, I kept to my carving bench, where I finished up the key block for the new year print, and the two ladies set up the large table on the back wall and started wrapping. I used my new 'time lapse' camera to capture their day, and here are a few scenes it caught.

They worked from left to right, Tsushima-san preparing the print and paperwork, then passing it to Ishigami-san for wrapping and labelling:

Here's the final bit of actual colour on the print - the cartouche box gets its usual touch of pink (slightly toned this time, as it was also 'hit' by the original beta block):