10th Anniversary of the Museum’s Opening: Hokusai Crossover—Gathering in “Sumida” Across the Ages

A woodblock print is a relief print: the image is cut into a block of wood, the parts meant to print are left level with the surface, and the rest is removed. The cut-away areas carry no ink. The raised surface is inked, and the paper laid on it is pressed or rubbed, often with a hand tool called a baren. Traditional Japanese prints are cut on cherry wood and printed with water-based inks, where Western woodcut typically uses oil-based ones. Early Japanese prints were mostly monochrome, in black ink only. Colour came by cutting one block for each colour and lining the blocks up with registration marks called kentō, as in ukiyo-e prints. From the late Meiji period, artists who carved and printed their own blocks began to make what are called creative prints.

Look closely at where black meets white and find the lines the knife left. Then step back and see how the black areas and the blank paper build the whole picture.

• Etching (copperplate print) 銅版画（エッチング）→Etching prints from ink held in hollowed lines, the opposite of a woodblock, which prints from the raised surface.

“Ukiyo” means the floating world, the world of the present. Subjects include beautiful women, kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, scenes from history, and famous places; around the 1830s Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige made landscape a genre of its own. A few are paintings by the artist's own hand, but most are prints, made by four people in turn: the publisher paid, the designer drew, the carver cut the blocks, and the printer printed. Early prints used black ink alone; around 1765, exchanging calendar prints in many colors became a fashion, publishers then sold such prints as nishiki-e, “brocade pictures,” and full-color printing spread.

In front of a print, find an edge where two colors meet. Each color has its own block; the printer lines the paper up with the registration marks cut into the block and prints from light colors to dark, one over another.