Hokusai Woodblock Prints (made from polystyrene!)

  by  Dread Pirate Roberts 

 Block prints are a quicker, easier and cheaper way of making art, so that more families can afford paintings for their houses. The famous Japanese artist Hokusai helped make these prints famous worldwide and this is how they are made...

We started off with one piece of polystyrene each per pair.  Since we were concentrating on Hokusai's most famous print The Great Wave, we lightly scraped the outline of the great wave and Mount Fuji. We then carefully broke the piece of polystyrene around the outline.

Next we coloured in the top half  (the sky) yellow, and the bottom (the sea) in light blue. Then we firmly pressed them both onto a piece of paper and held them for a bit, and took them off. After we had taken them off we saw the printed colours of the first layer of the sky, and the first colour of the sea. We then cut out the froth of the waves and whatever we wanted to stay light blue and the clouds and whatever we wanted to stay yellow. Next we, with paint rollers, painted the top part of the polystyrene over with red and the bottom over with the colour dark blue. Once again we pressed the two parts of polystyrene firmly over the paper again and after a bit, when we took the polystyrene off, we then found our almost finished picture.

Finally, using ink and small, thin brushes, we went over all the lines and drew curvy lines (the froth) over the wave itself.  We had our finished print!