This woodblock print depicts the character Saitama, from the anime “One-Punch Man”. This was carved and printed by me in late 2021. This was only my fourth print, I think, so it’s a bit rough in some aspects, but I’m pretty happy overall with how it turned out.
The print was based on this screenshot from the opening to the first season of One-Punch Man.
I digitally traced all of the lines and separated each of the colors on to their own layers in GIMP. This animation shows how the colors can be stacked to form the final image.
After doing all of the digital prep work, it was time to carve the blocks. I used a laser printer to print out my line tracing on to a piece of paper, and then pasted down that image on to wood.
I chose to make the image approximately 7.25 x 5.0 inches (18.5 x 12.5 cm), so that I could cut my larger sheets of paper to size with minimal waste.
Here is the key block carved on shina plywood. Carving key lines like this on plywood is a bit risky, since the top layer has a tendency to pop off. Fortunately, I had only one small section of a line pop off, on one of the cape lines.
The color blocks were also carved on shina and can be seen below:
After all the carving was done, it was time to print. Here is the resulting print:
This was printed on “Shiramine Select” paper from Awagami Factory. I printed on the rough/textured side of the paper because I didn’t know any better; but in hindsight, it would have been easier to get smooth/flat colors by using the smooth side of the paper.