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So, after taking a full month 'off' - and a very productive month it was indeed! - it's now time to get back to reality and get started on the design work for the next print in the 'My Solitudes' series.

This will be the 'Forest in Winter'. I'm not giving away any secrets when I tell you that the main 'ingredients' for this one will be ... snow and trees!

Now 'shin-hanga printmaking' and 'snow', go together like raspberry jam on rice pudding - there is just no better combination to be found anywhere, anyplace. Hasui et al popped these things out on an assembly line basis. This print should be easy.

Should.

As usual though - there are a number of things getting in the way of a smooth run through this one.

In the kind of printmaking that I do, white snow is always delineated by the white paper. So in that sense, creating a snow scene is kind of easy - just chop away areas from a normal landscape image, and presto, you get snow. Or you can go the other way, start with a blank sheet, and just touch here and there with black, leaving people with the impression that everything else is snow. Yoshida did one like that a long time ago:

Now that's OK of course, but for me it just doesn't 'pop' enough. On the day that I made the trip described in the story that will accompany this print, it snowed during the night, and I woke up to a world completely buried in snow. I had a little camera with me, and took a few snaps:

That photo - of my tent - was taken at daybreak, when it was still kind of gloomy - no nice sunshine yet. But that forest is so tangled in most places, that even when the sun did come up, it was still difficult to find nice 'bright' scenes.

Now snow blanketing a wide landscape is 'picturesque' ... as is snow on a single tree seen against the sky. But snow like this to the extent that it blots out everything in sight, is nothing but a damn mess. So how did Hasui and the boys deal with this kind of thing?

Their main way was to avoid the question entirely. They never came into the forest - they stood back and . . .
[Long item has been trimmed at this point. The full blog entry can be viewed here]