Customer Reviews

Salter: Japanese Woodblock Printing (PH)

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Although names like Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro aren't as widely known as the names of Western artists, some of their imagery (such as Hokusai's "Great Wave") is very familiar. If you've ever wondered how such delicacy, complexity, and expression rise up from a block of wood and a knife, you've come to the right place.

Salter has studied extensively under Japanese masters, and presents their classic techniques in clear, enjoyable words and images. What surprised me most - and probably should not have - is the way that Japanese woodcut parallels Western technique, but intersects it at so very few points. Every part of the craft, wood, tools, papers, and inks, coordinate with all the others in subtle ways. It's really not possible to extract just one feature of the art and fit it into the Western printshop, or to add individual pieces of Western technique to the Japanese craft. As a result, Salter describes everything, even the non-Western sharpening stones for the cutting tools, in great detail.

Since printmaking is a visual art, this is a visual book. Although the text is readable and thorough, Salter liberally salts the text with photos. Many show samples of the finished prints, demonstrating the effect of each technique, but most illustrate the tools and techniques of the printmaker. Even the layout of the printmaker's bench gets its own diagrams, showing how it optimizes the master printer's comfort and efficiency.

If you love prints, and Japanese prints in particular, you'll eventually want to know more about how they're made. I doubt that I could use this as my only text for making Japanese-style prints. Still, this beautiful and well-made book presents the best description I've seen on Japanese technique. I recommend it highly.

//wiredweird

This is a fascinating guide to the production of Japanese woodblock prints, whether your intention is to produce a woodblock print or, as a collector or student of Japanese prints, to acquire a better understanding of the processes which take place in order to better appreciate the prints in your collection. The book deals with every aspect of woodblock printing, including the types of wood used, inks, tools, papers, and includes clear instructions on how to produce a print yourself. There is also a section dealing with special printing techniques, such as embossing, colour gradation, and using mica. For those of us who do not reside in Japan there are Western equivalents listed for the items needed in woodblock print production, and a list of suppliers in the UK, US, Australia and Japan (including mail order). The text is informative and there are many photos throughout to demonstrate the various tools required and stages of print production. An excellent guide.

This book covers its subject thoroughly. It addresses the tools in detail, the substrates, the technique of cutting different kinds of blocks, tool maintenance, and the printing process. The prose is clear and straightforward, and designed to enable the reader to actually produce a precise, full-color woodcut after the Japanese fashion, after absorbing the contents of the book. One nice touch is her inclusion of the Japanese names-Romanized- for the components of the Japanese printmaking system, for some of which there is no English equivalent. If the reader goes shopping online for those components, e.g., the array of cutting tools, they are often found identified only by their Japanese names. She also includes many examples of old and recent Japanese woodcuts to convince the skeptic why the subject is worth pursuing. It appears that while they were developing an approach to slab-grain woodcut that rivals western end-grain wood-engraving in attainable degree of detail, western woodcut practice has gone off in the direction of German Expressionism-big areas of black, loose, blocky carving technique, reliance on the white line, and no reliable color registration. This book welcomes you to the world of finely detailed, full-color woodcuts.

This book is a great overview of this type of printmaking. It covers every aspect of the subject and gives basic instructions for creating these prints. The reader could hope for a little more detail in some areas, such as mixing the colors or how to brush them on the blocks, but printmaking requires some experimentation to get the details just right to suit individuals. I learned a lot from this little book.

I have 30 years experience in printing-making and painting. I found this book really marginally helpful in expanding any technical knowledge. Most of the artwork used in the illustrations just left me cold and did not inspire me to get to work on a new print, indeed, I found some used for technique illustration to be unclear and unhelpful. As a technical manual, its not so great, as an informational overview it's "okay", but I think there are other books out there that do both jobs better.