This woodblock print depicts the character Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon, from the anime “Sailor Moon” (็พๅฐๅฅณๆฆๅฃซใปใผใฉใผใ ใผใณ). It was carved and first printed in late 2023.
This image is based on the iconic scene from the 1990’s anime, in which the titular character becomes serious and declares “On behalf of the moon, I will punish you!”,
which occurs in nearly every episode.
I took a still from the anime, and digitally traced and separated its colors. The short video to the left shows the separate colors/layers, and how they combine to form the final image.
This was perhaps my most ambitious print project so far. It has the most blocks/impressions to date, some of the most delicate carving I’ve done, as well as several new printing techniques that I wanted to learn/experiment with.
One such technique that I wanted to learn with this project was gradations/bokashi; and there ended up being 17 gradations in total, so I really had to get the hang of it. Fortunately, many of those gradations used the same colors and could be squeezed together on to the same block, so I could achieve multiple gradations with a single impression; although it was quite tedious nevertheless. There ended up being 8 blocks/faces containing at least one gradation.
All in all, there were 18 impressions required for the final print (not counting double impressions), which were spread across 6 (or 7, if you count re-carves) physical blocks of wood, as shown below:
I placed the hair on a block with the grain running vertically, so that any grain lines in the print would flow with the hair.
(shared with the hair block as you can see)
The key block was carved on American Cherry wood glued to a plywood core. All of the other blocks were carved on Shina plywood.
For one block on this project, I had experimented with a different method of preparing the surface of the block, which did not quite go as expected, and required some color areas to be re-carved on a new block. I’ve previously had success with wet sanding solid cherry boards used for the key block, so I thought it might work with Shina as well. However, this rendered the Shina blocks more or less unusable, and I should’ve cut and run early on, rather than trying to use that block. I may do a more detailed postmortem analysis about this at some point.
When I initially envisioned this print, I had imagined utilizing mica powder to add some bling to the gold jewelry worn by Sailor Moon, as well as adding a sparkle effect on the stars in the background. However, during test printing, I found that the typical makikira technique (printing a glue on the paper and sprinkling mica powder on to the glue) added a bit too much bling, which kind of distracted from the rest of the image. So I ended up using the surikira method, where I added some mica powder into my pigment bowl for that color, which turned out quite nicely, I think, giving it a nice subtle sparkle effect. Have a look at the “detail” photo near the top of the page and look at the headband to see how it turned out.
As for the mica on the stars in the background: the block I carved ended up having some registration issues, and I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to fix. I believe the registration issue was partially due to a) paper shrinkage not being accounted for (i.e. the paper is damp/wet when printed, but should be quite a bit drier when printing the mica), and b) due to the janky way in which I transferred star pattern (and earrings) to the other block. I may come back to this at some point and fix or re-carve this block.
The paper for this print was Awagami Shiramine, which worked quite well; and which I’m discovering behaves quite differently (in a good way) from the “Select” variety of Shiramine.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the final result. I’m pretty happy about the carving — Especially on the key block, there are some fine lines on the face and around the hands which I’m a bit proud of. And there were very few carving mistakes, which I’m also quite happy about.
However, I may have bit off slightly more than I can chew in terms of printing. The final print looks nice at a glance, but when you look a bit closer, some of the printing is a bit sloppy: a slight mis-registration here, some tamari there, uneven color, etc. And when you compound that over 18+ impressions, the errors tend to accumulate; and I struggled to create a “perfect” print. Despite all that, I do feel like I’m slowly improving as a printer. I definitely learned a lot with this project.
Bonus detail pics:
