"La Couronne Impériale" is inspired by
a sketch I made from this series of 4000m peaks in the Swiss Alps in autumn 2017.
The four blocks of this woodcut were carved long before my trip to Japan.
Back home, I found it very interesting to print it. I could benefit from the addition of new knowledge about the printing process. And, not a slight advantage, I had no carving work to do.
The first thing I realized rather than learned in Japan is to make several passes of the same block to intensify a color or a gradient, or simply to correct the badly printed areas. In the example above, I intensify the smooth gradient (kata bokashi 片暈し) with a second pass with a straight line gradient at the top (Itchi Moji Bokachi 一文字暈し).
This first block was used another time to print the orange and yellow trees.
The second block was for the greens.
And was also printed twice in order to darken the foreground sap trees.
The third block is a mauve mountains skyline gradient. Just notice that it covers the light green forest on the slope of the mountain.
This looks obvious on these two pictures on the back of the sheet.
The fourth and last block is a kind of key block.
It is a multicolor block that needed several passes to control everything.
This print is an edition of 8, used Holbein Watercolors and Kochi Roll paper.
Given that I printed this woodcut after my trip to Japan at the fall 2019, I signed my name in Katakana for the first time.
