Principles and Main Considerations in designing Wood-block
Prints--Their Application to Modern Colour Printing
Until one has become quite familiar with the craft of wood-block
printing it is not possible to make a satisfactory design for a print,
or to understand either the full resources that are available or the
limits that are fixed.
In beginning it is well to undertake only a small design, so that no
great amount of material or time need be consumed in gaining the first
experience, but this small piece of work should be carried through to
the end, however defective it may become at any stage. A small key-block
and two or three colour patches may all be cut on the two sides of one
plank for this purpose.
There is great diversity of opinion as to the conventions that are
appropriate to the designing of colour prints. In the work of the
Japanese masters the convention does not vary. A descriptive black or
grey line is used throughout the design, outlining all forms or used as
flat spots or patches. The line is not always uniform, but is developed
with great subtlety to suggest the character of the form expressed, so
that the subsequent flat mass of colour printed within the line appears
to be modelled. This treatment of the line is one of the great resources
of the work, and is special to this kind of design, in which the line
has to be cut with the knife _on both sides_, and is for this reason
capable of unusual development in its power of expressing form. Indeed
the knife is the final instrument in the drawing of the design.
Typical examples of key-block impressions are given on pages 26 and 33:
they show the variety of character and quality possible in the lines and
black masses of key-blocks.
The designing of a print depends most of all upon this development of
line and black mass in the key-block. The colour pattern of the print is
held together by it, and the form suggested. In the Japanese prints the
key-block is invariably printed black or grey. Masses intended to be
dense black in the finished print are printed first a flat grey by the
key-block, and are then printed a full black from a colour-block like
any other patch of colour, the double printing being necessary to give
the intensity of the black.
Although several modern prints have been designed on other principles,
and sometimes a coloured key-block is successfully used, yet the
convention adopted by the Japanese is the simplest and most fundamental
of all. Outside its safe limitations the technical difficulties are
increased, and one is led to make compromises that strain the proper
resources of block printing and are of doubtful advantage.
The temptation to use colour with the key-block comes when one attempts
to use the key-block for rendering light and shadow. Its use by the
Japanese masters was generally for the descriptive expression of the
contours of objects, ignoring entirely their shadows, or any effects of
light and shade, unless a shadow happened occasionally to be an
important part of the pattern of the design. Generally, as in nearly all
the landscape prints by Hiroshigé, the line is descriptive or suggestive
of essential form, not of effects in light and shade.
If the key-block is used for light and shade, the question of relative
tones and values of shadows arises, and these will be falsified unless a
key-block is made for each separate plane or part of the design, and
then there is danger of confusion or of compromises that are beyond the
true scope of the work.
It is generally safest to print the key-block in a tone that blends with
the general tone of the print, and not to use it as a part of the
colour pattern. It serves mainly to control the form, leaving the
colour-blocks to give the colour pattern. There are cases, of course,
where no rule holds good, and sometimes a design may successfully omit
the key-block altogether, using only a few silhouettes of colour, one of
which controls the main form of the print, and serves as key-block.
Frequently, also, the key-block may be used to give the interior form or
character of part of a design, leaving the shape of a colour-block to
express the outside shape or contour; as in the spots suggesting foliage
in the print on page 114. The shapes of the tree forms are partly left
to the colour-block to complete, the key only giving the suggestion of
the general broken character of the foliage, not the outside limits of
the branches. The outer shape of a tree or branch is rarely expressed by
an enclosing line in any of the Japanese prints. The key-block is often
used to describe interior form when a silhouette of colour is all that
is needed for the contour. The expressive rendering of the rough surface
of tree trunks and of forms of rock, or the articulation of plants and
the suggestion of objects in atmospheric distance or mist, should be
studied in good prints by the Japanese masters. In printed work by
modern masters--as, for example, the work of the great French designers
of poster advertisements--much may be learnt in the use and development
of expressive line.
The Japanese system of training is well described in a book by Henry P.
Bowie on "The Laws of Japanese Painting," in which many useful
suggestions are given with reference to graphic brush drawing and the
suggestive use of line and brush marks.
As part of the training of a designer for modern decorative printing,
the experience and sense of economy that are to be gained from the study
of wood-block printing are very great. Perhaps no work goes so directly
to the essentials of the art of decorative designing for printed work
of all kinds. The wood blocks not only compel economy of design, but
also lead one to it.
Even as a means of general training in the elements of decorative
pictorial composition the wood blocks have great possibilities as an
adjunct to the courses of work followed by art students. The same
problems that arise in all decoration may be dealt with by their means
on a small scale, but under conditions that are essentially instructive.
Colour schemes may be studied and worked out with entire freedom by
printing and reprinting until a problem is thoroughly solved. A colour
design may be studied and worked out as fully by means of a small set of
blocks, and with more freedom for experiment and alteration than is
possible by the usual methods of study, such as painting and repainting
on paper or canvas or wall; for the form being once established by the
blocks, the colour may be reconstructed again and again without limit.
The craft has thus not only its special interest as a means of personal
expression, but also a more general use as a means of training and
preparation for the wider scope and almost unlimited resources of modern
printing. The best use of those resources will be made by artists who
have been trained under simpler conditions, and have found their way
gradually to an understanding of the secrets of æsthetic economy in
printing. One of the many paths to that experience is by way of the
craft of the wood-block printer.