Japanese woodblock printing - part 2

Today we finished carving our blocks, and had a demonstration of how to sharpen our carving tools (most of us had bought a set of our own yesterday). We also went to have a look at the Peacocks Among The Ruins exhibition upstairs. This included some wonderful examples of woodblock-printed wallpapers.

In the afternoon we had a demonstration of how to print from our blocks, and then we were let loose with the paints! It was quite difficult to work out exactly how much paint to put on the block, so some of my attempts turned out a bit splodgy!

It was amazing to see how many different effects could be achieved from one block with different applications of paint and different amounts of pressure, and because we had carved on both sides of our blocks we could overlay the two to give even more effects.