Ukiyo-e: Artistic Style & Methods

Ukiyo-e is defined as much by its method of production as by its subjects. A finished color print was the product of a tightly organized collaboration among four kinds of specialists, coordinated by the publisher, or hanmoto, who financed the project, judged public taste, commissioned the work, and sold the result. The publisher's seal, along with censor's seals, often appears on the print itself.

The process began with the artist (eshi), who drew the master design in ink on thin, semi-transparent paper. This drawing was pasted face-down onto a block of smooth cherry wood, and the block carver (horishi) cut away everything but the lines, destroying the original drawing in the process to produce the "key block" of black outlines. For a full-color print, the carver then cut a separate block for each color, working from proofs that indicated where each hue should fall.

The printer (surishi) brought the image to life. Water-based pigments, mixed with rice paste for body, were brushed onto each block in turn, and a sheet of strong handmade mulberry paper (washi) was laid down and rubbed from behind with a coiled pad called a baren. The key to multi-color printing was the kento, a set of carved registration marks-an L-shaped notch and a straight edge at the corners of each block-that let the printer align every successive color exactly over the last. A single print might require a dozen or more separate impressions.

Within this system artists developed a distinctive visual language. Ukiyo-e favors flat areas of unmodulated color bounded by confident outlines, asymmetrical compositions, bold croppings, and high or oblique viewpoints rather than the single fixed perspective of European painting. Negative space is used expressively, and pattern-in textiles, water, rain, and snow-becomes a subject in itself. Printers also developed refinements such as bokashi, the graded shading of a color across the sheet (seen in Hokusai's and Hiroshige's skies and seas), and the import of synthetic Prussian blue in the 1820s gave landscape prints their intense, characteristic blues.

Because prints were multiples rather than unique objects, impressions vary: early, carefully printed states are crisper and richer than later ones pulled from worn blocks, and surviving colors range from vivid to faded depending on light exposure. Reading a ukiyo-e print therefore means attending not only to the artist's design but to the carver's line, the printer's color, and the publisher's choices.