Key Blocks Completed for New Prints

I've just finished cutting the key blocks for my next set of prints.

I've decided, for personal family reasons to call them 'The Grace Quartet' and they're closely based on images I found on the internet from an 1860's Japanese woodblock print book of pictures attributed to Hiroshige. The images are certainly in his style, but whether they were actually by him, I'm not sure.

As you'll be able to see from the photo of the colour blocks, which I'm now starting to clear, the images are fairly monochrome, either blue or peach. The blue irises will have a large graduated tone in the background.

Each of the 4 prints are approx 5 x 7 inches, and as you can see, I'll be printing 2 images at once, something which I do quite often as it's a good economical use of materials and time. It was also common practice in Japan where a block could contain a number of individual prints which would be cut down later.

Spare time has been thin on the ground this year for printmaking, but I'm hoping to get this set completed in the next month or so. Then it's on to my annual Christmas/Winter print. I'll post some really good news about my 2008 Christmas print in the next few days.

Woodblock Print Cost Calculator

One of the biggest questions for anyone produces artwork is 'how much do I charge?'

With animation the answer is always, 'How long is a piece of string?'

There are a myriad of things which can alter the cost of animation: complexity of design or action, illustration style and deadlines are just really the tip of the iceberg. You need as much information from the client as possible in order to calculate the cost.

With woodblock printing it's a little different. You have the materials, your time and what you consider your artistic worth.

So, how much do you charge for a print? What is the break even point where, even if you don't make a profit, you can cover the cost of materials and your time?

I wanted to work this out in a way that I can apply to all the prints I've produced to date, and the ones in the pipeline, and so I've put together an Excel spreadsheet 'Woodblock Print Calculator'.

Here's a screen grab of part of the first page.

I've tailored it to work the way I work, which I've standardised to make the packaging and shipping of prints easier. At the moment my prints either fit A4 or A5 cello bags, although the actual print size may vary.

As you can see, I can enter the title of the print, how many prints I intend to produce, how many blocks I will use, and how many colours (or impressions) there will be.

An 'A5 Twin' is my name for 2 prints cut on the same set of blocks, which cost less to produce than 2 A5 prints on separate blocks.

Based on this information and prices of blocks, paper and other materials which I've added, the spreadsheet works out the actual cost of materials to produce an edition, and a single print.

It will also work out my packaging costs, and my labour costs (based on any yearly income and hours you input) for the whole process from design to slipping the finished print into the cello bag.

It's taken a while to work out the formulas in Excel which run in the background, but I can now accurately cost every print I produce, even down to adding a % profit mark-up and including VAT.

The good thing is that I can continue to add new materials to include in the calculations and update any changes in material costs with one click, and the spreadsheet will recalculate all the totals.

I've also added a 'Reprint?' button, which, if you enter 'y' (yes) will remove any of the materials and labour costs related to design, cutting blocks, creating hanshita etc.

Sheet 2 of the calculator is a 1 page summary of all the total calculations which you can print off as a handy reference.

I'm pretty confident that I've got all my calculations right, and the Woodblock Calculator does work for me. I suppose this is Version 1.0 and in the future I'll add extra bits. I'm sure any woodblock printer with basic knowledge of Excel (or a friend of a printer!) could tailor it to suit their work practices too.

If you'd like a copy, let me know and I'll email the Excel file.

Seal carver to recommend - Harmonyunion

I've just recieved this beautiful seal set, custom made for me by Liwen Deng in China. He has an eBay shop from where he sells his own carved seals and custom designed seals.

I asked if he could carve my name using Kanji (or original Chinese symbols), but he also carves words in other languages (or a mixture of both) as well as images or any other designs. If you can design it, Deng can carve it.



As you can see, the seal is made up of 4 symbols which read phonetically as Mark Mason.
Each word meaning is: Ma--a horse, Ke- overcome, Mei-plum flower, Sen-forest.

I wanted something humourous to reflect my work as a cartoon animator, and a horse overcome by a forest of plum blossoms is quite fun.




What is so good about Deng's service is the quality of the materials he works with and his skill as a carver, added to which, he supplied the seal in a beautiful little case with a small tin of seal paste, and all for $15.00 and around $7.00 shipping from China to the UK.

I have a couple of designs of my initials which I use on my prints which I'm going to ask Deng to carve as seals.

Please have a look at Deng's eBay shop "Harmonyunion" and support a great hardworking craftsman.

The Art of Japan Exhibition

We seem to be doing very well for exhibitions of woodblock prints in the North West of England this year. If you hurry, you can catch the last few days of "The Art of Japan" an exhibition of woodblock prints and paintings at the Peter Scott Gallery at Lancaster University.

The exhibition is made up of prints on loan from the Blackburn Art Gallery collection and the University's own collection and include original works by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Eisen, Koson and many others. There are examples of Ukiyo-e prints, including Hokusai's "Great Wave", "Red Fuji" and "Fuji with Lightning" and also some beautiful surimono (Monkey & Turtle), Sumo prints, silk painting and some lovely examples of prints from the Shin Hanga movement.

Monkey and Turtle Surimono

The real highlight for me though were 3 woodblocks in a glass cabinet, and one in particular. It was an original block of a page from one of Kitao Masayoshi's abbreviated drawing books! I never thought I'd ever see one of those. I would never have imagined that any would have even survived over the years, but there it was. It had obviously been cut in half, as a block for a book would have 2 pages on it, and it had also been painted white with the relief lines painted black at some time in it's history.

The exhibition runs until May 30th, late night Thursday until 9.00pm.

A Blast from the Stone Age Past.

As a result of some online conversations about new developments in traditional 2D paperless animation and some of the very early pieces of animation software (Hands up; who had an Amiga computer and ran DeluxePaint and Take2 on it?) I received an email from Jerome Lorin who kindly included a link to a piece of animation I worked on with Billy Allison from Core Design in 1994.

Have a peep HERE.

It was a title sequence for the Sega computer game "Chuck Rock II". We had to work within the huge constraints of computer game memory at the time, and so the animation is rather limited in places. I thought I'd add it to the Blog purely for it's nostalgia value. At the time though, the title sequence received a host of 5 star ratings in computer magazines.

The "inking" and colour work was produced in DeluxePaint, on good old Amiga computers.

I continued to use an Amiga for animation pencil tests (Using the excellent Take2 program) up until the end of "Second Star to the Left" in around 2002. Amigas were great little computers with excellent graphics capabilities (2D and 3D) far in excess of PCs at the time. It's a shame they got left behind in the blitz of hype and publicity that surrounded the dull old PC that most of us use today. Amigas were happy computers.

Hydrus Watercolour tests. The results are in...

The completed test image.

6 months ago I started a test to check the lightfastness of Hydrus Fine Art Watercolour by Dr. Ph. Martin's as compared with Winsor and Newton Artist's Watercolour which has a measured lightfastness rating. Previous posts on how, and why I decided to run this test are HERE.

As you can see from the above image, and compare it with the image from the start of the test, there is no fading. The slightly lighter appearance of the red at the top righthand side is due to my application of the watercolour and can be seen in the original image too.

The Hydrus colours are the top 3, the Winsor and Newton are the 3 at the bottom.

I was expecting to see some evidence of a faded edge line where I'd placed thick card to create the unexposed areas, but there is none.

This test sheet has been sat in a south facing (ie: direct sunlight) for 6 months. The area on the far left has been unexposed, the next section exposed for 2 months, the next for 4 and the far righthand side has been exposed for the full 6 months.

The weather has been bright and sunny on the whole. You would never put a watercolour painting in direct sunlight, so this has been a tough test for the pigments. The Hydrus colours have stood up to the task brilliantly, and I'm now confident that I can produce water based woodblock prints with either the Hydrus colours or the Winsor and Newton watercolours without any fear of fading.

The good thing about the Hydrus colours is that they're so quick to use straight from the bottle and diluted with water. One drop of colour goes such a long way, and by using the pipette each bottle contains, it's easy to keep a record of mixing and diluting measurements just in case you need to remix another amount. I just wish they were more readily available in the UK. I had to order mine via mail order in the US.

I hope others will find this test useful when deciding which materials to use for their art projects.

Hydrus Ink Permanence Test. 2 Months in.

Just a quick update on my 6 month test to compare the permanence of Hydrus Watercolour Inks with the established permanence of Winsor & Newton Artists Watercolours.

We're now 2 months in, and the strips of colour have spent all that time in a south facing window.

We've had a bright and sunny late Summer and early Autumn (Fall, for our trans pond chums) and I've exposed the next section of the test sheet to reveal... ABSOLUTELY NO FADING WHATSOEVER in either the Winsor & Newton or the Dr. Martens Hydrus colours.

I did't think it was worth posting an image at this stage. I'll post an image at the end of the test.

Based on the results so far, I've decided to use the Hydrus colours on my next woodblock print, which I've finished cutting and have just started to print. I'll post that in the next few days.

Here's my post at the start of the test: HYDRUS TEST START.

Hydrus Watercolour Permanence Test Starts.

Test Card. Hydrus - top, Winsor & Newton - bottom.

I've started my permanence/lightfastness test today. As you can see from the image above I'm using 2 sets of primary colours; Hydrus Fine Art Watercolour by Dr. Ph. Martin's and Winsor and Newton Artist's Watercolour. I want to see if the Hydrus colours are lightfast, or at least as lightfast as the W & N colours.

On the bottles of Hydrus it says: Hydrus fine art watercolour is made from the finest artist's pigments which have been chosen for extreme lightfastness and brilliance. Hydrus gives to the watercolourist a new freedom to blend and intermix while maintaining the transparency and luminosity of the colour.

On the test card I've produced there are 6 stripes of paint, the top 3 Hydrus colours are: Cadmium Red, Hansa Yellow Light and Phthalo Blue. I diluted them by 2 drops of water to every 1 drop of liquid colour.

The Winsor and Newton colours are: Cadmium Red (rated A permanence, ASTM I.), Winsor Yellow (rated A permanence, ASTM I.) and Winsor Blue (Green shade) (rated A permanence, ASTM II.). Each of these were diluted to the same level as the Hydrus colours.

The test card is now standing in a south facing window with the "6 month" section only exposed. The rest of the card is securely covered with a very thick piece of grey card.

On the 21st October I'll expose the next section, along with the existing exposed area, and the final area will be exposed on 21st December. The test will end on 21st February.

I'd like to use the Hydrus colours to produce woodblock prints, but if the colours fade hugely then I'll stick to traditional tube watercolour. We'll see...

Hydrus colour fade test.

I've just purchased a couple of bottles of Dr. Ph. Martin's Hydrus Fine Art Watercolours to try out for watercolour painting and woodblock printing. I couldn't find a single reference to their lightfastness on'th internet although the marketing blurb says that they're produced using pure pigment, not dye and that they are all permanent and lightfast... we'll see...

I'm going to run a test over the next six months to compare their lightfastness against Winsor & Newton Artist's Watercolour. I'll paint stripes of colour using red ,yellow and blue from both products and leave the paper partially exposed in a south-facing window.

Every two months I'll expose a little strip of the colours to the light, and after six months I'll have a colour chart of results ranging from unexposed, through two and four months to six months.

I hope the results will be useful to anyone else wondering about this product.

I'll post update images every two months.