Printing Hokusai's Great Picture Book of Everything.

July 10, 2023 3:13 PM

A collection of Hokusai's drawings are being carved onto woodblocks and printed for the first time A few years after their discovery and exhibition at the British Museum, Dave Bull and the team at Mokuhankan are taking the final steps to publish some of Hokusai's drawings that have not previously been printed as wood block prints, following the same processes that would have been used during Hokusai's lifetime. You can subscribe to the production run to receive copies of these prints as they are produced.
posted by cubby (9 comments total)

MeFi's own™ woodblock100!
posted by Floydd at 3:38 PM on July 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

David Bull is also producing a video series on the project. Episodes 1 and 2 are posted so far.
posted by cubby at 3:55 PM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Bull had a kickstarter back in 2017 called Ukyio-e Heroes, showing modern video game heros and bosses rendered with traditional woodblock printing techniques. His whole video oeuvre is fantastic.
posted by mhoye at 4:17 PM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

At a meetup a while back, Dave gave us all bookmarks with the Ukyio-e Heroes, and it's something I treasure, lil chibi Ryu throwing a fireball at chibi Chun-li, who is yawning while holding out a marshmallow on a stick. It's adorable.

I know corona hit Mokuhankan pretty hard, I'm glad to see things are going well. Damn, I need to stop by some time.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:57 PM on July 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is anyone else having problems with the Mokuhankan site linked above? I can't tell if the site is just janky or it's being hugged to death. A shame, I'm very interested in ordering a set.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:44 PM on July 10, 2023

star: does this one work for you? The site does appear to be a bit quirky; feels like old internet architecture somehow
posted by cubby at 7:56 PM on July 10, 2023

Is anyone else having problems with the Mokuhankan site linked above?

The link takes me to a landing page where you then select from two versions of the site to which to continue. A “widescreen” version or a “responsive” version. I’m assuming the site was built during the era of website construction when “responsive” sites were becoming teh new hotness, but tended to look like utter ass on desktops.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:42 AM on July 11, 2023

This is a lovely thing to do.
posted by Phanx at 8:09 AM on July 11, 2023

cubby: thank you, that link works.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:22 AM on July 11, 2023