Living Prints® Woodcut On-line

Tracing an image

In the Preface, I asked people to visualize a 17th century printing house in Nanking, China, called the "Ten Bamboo Studio." It is from a book by Joseph Vedlich. The English version was published by Crescent Books (a division of Crown Publishers, NY) in 1979. Since it inspired the Woodcut on-line project, I took the liberty of showing part of one of the reproductions. Hopefully this is not breaking copyright laws as it will be illustrating the Chinese woodblock printing process as I understand it.

The woodcut will be a reproduction of the reproduction. There are reasons for my doing this which I will reveal later. Suffice it to say this is a both a research project and a technical experiment. (Also, this is a way of visualizing future plans which I will share with people interested in printmaking and travel abroad.)

I trace the dark outlines with a pen on a thin Japanese paper. This may take a long time, for I work on this only a little while each day. Tedious, yes, but it gives me time to reflect on the details of the image. In the picture below, you can see in the upper left corner where I started tracing some bamboo leaves. You can make out the image, faintly, under the paper, and a clearer part of the image of the reproduction in the upper right.

My tracing will show easily after I  rub off the thin paper. The intricate details are difficult to cut but it's part of the work of cutting.

• Japanese tracing paper over the reproduction of "Pine, bamboo and plum tree" from Vedlich' Ten Bamboo Studio, pp. 76-77. The artist's goal is to study the Chinese woodcut manner for depicting pine needles for use in his work, "My ancestors and me".

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©1999 Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. ritchie@seanet.com