Getting Into The Cherry Blossoms

Hand printed with acrylic on paper by Bram Tan.

Cherry blossom season is a pretty cool spectacle. Unfortunately I remember this 2019 one because of the viral stories about tourists shaking trees to artificially create a bed of petals around their feet to get a better selfie for Instagram. Outrageous.

Despite this, I was inspired to reproduce Hokusai's 'Mount Fuji Behind Cherry Blossoms'. I could only find a half decent example online which would have to do. There are many small details on this one so I has to make sure they were large enough for the printer to print each tiny island, which were only around 1mm wide. This define the overall size of the painting which ended up being 900mm wide x 300mm tall.

The final print required 8 colours and each plate was split into three to fit into the 3D printer. 24 woodblock were 3D printed in total.

After 3D printing the blocks are carefully joined with very strong tape and then comes sanding for a nice smooth print surface.

Final block about to print, the darkest tone is always the last one I do. It changes everything.