Step Four ...

Wave pattern ... Before you start to yell about this artist borrowing Hokusai's famous wave pattern, you might remember that this picture was created more than a hundred years earlier, and indeed the pattern must go back a long way before that ...

Patterns like this were just 'elements'; designers spent years training and learning how to reproduce a large 'library' of standard patterns and picture elements. Many of these people (most of them?) then spent the rest of their lives endlessly recycling them round and round in various forms. But just occasionally, somebody would come along who could use the same set of basic pieces, and create something like this design ...

 

Interesting that at this point, this print looks just like a 'benizuri-e' (green-red picture), an early type of colour printing in Japan that used a key block and two colours - green and pale pink. That's purely coincidence, and we're not 'recapitulating' the evolution of colour block printing in this print! It is also interesting that the print as you see it here is less attractive that it was a couple of steps back. Because I have a clear model in my mind of 'where we are going', I'm not bothered by that of course, but to an artist working on an original print this kind of thing can pose quite some difficulties.

Making a print is not just a question of keeping at it until it looks good and then stopping - one has to be able to mentally 'jump' forward and imagine the result after the subsequent steps are done. What makes this particularly difficult is the fact that our eyes constantly fool us with colours - this green tint on the wave pattern will look totally different once it is surrounded by the colours that are coming up.

But this is where the experience of the printmaker comes into play - I remember vividly these sorts of frustrations in my earlier days ... "That colour has changed! I know it didn't look like that when I printed it!" Well, maybe it didn't ... but maybe it did ... And anyway, if it was too easy, it wouldn't be any fun, would it!