Japanese woodblock printing with the Hatton Gallery and Northern Print

A couple of weekends ago, I got up extra early and went on a half day course at Northern Print, to learn the basics of Japanese woodblock printing. The course was organised by the Hatton Gallery together with Northern Print and was run by the lovely Helen.


We learned how to use the various cutting tools to cut our designs out of a wooden block, and then had time to print them using the studio's press. Helen also taught us useful things like how to carve the wood without cutting any of our fingers off.

I tried to be really speedy and cut two designs - one out of each side of my wooden block - so I could print them on top of each other. Helen also showed us how to use paper stencils to prints shapes over our prints as well.






The print on the top left is on Japanese rice paper so looks slightly different from the other three.


The next print is just using the secondary design which I carved out of the back of my wooden block. You can see that I didn't have time to cut out all the wood properly,so there are lots of lines around the leaves.

The third print (bottom left) uses both of the designs, and the print on the bottom right uses paper stencils over the first green layer.


If you've done any lino printing, this seemed fairly similar to me, but obviously you can get various effects from the wood grain in your print which you wouldn't get with lino. And like lino printing, you don't need a press as you can print from your blocks at home, using a wooden spoon or a baren to press the paper and block together.