Mokuhankan Japanese Prints - 2019 Update

good morning this is wood puppet maker Dave bull here in our shop in a sucks a Tokyo with a quick year-end update on our activities the cards and letter emails anyway have been pouring in asking when our next YouTube video will be ready now we've actually got a number of videos started but this past autumn has been just so crazy here that we have been unable to get them finished so many fans of our work have come to the door some for print parties some for shopping and some just to stop by and say hello and take a selfie together it's been a ton of fun for me in the crew here but it has been kind of exhausting and it certainly didn't leave much time for anything else with the result now that it's been I guess what is it four months since our previous video but what goes up must come down and that flood of autumn visitors has now tapered off and over the next few months until spring arrives we'll have time to try and get caught up on many overlooked projects of course among them the production of a bunch of new videos for right now though here and now I need an update and that's what this video will be about a mixed bag of news and updates I've got a long long checklist of things to talk about let's get to it first up has to be the announcement of the subscription series for 2020 the viewers of the twitch stream already know what it will be because they've seen me working on the blocks for the first print and I've even been getting their feedback on such things as the series title and questions about which seems to include the series will have its roots in the set of prints we've just completed the Japan journey this is the first print from the 2019 series this was a set of designs we created following the style generally known as shin hunga the genre that first came to life in Japan just about a hundred years ago in the first half of the 20th century the Japanese landscape was the main topic of those prints and they have been loved ever since now shin hungar prints are stunningly complex to create much more difficult than the more straightforward ouki way but we gave it a try and I think our team right from jedson putting down his first sketches through the carving and printing down on the fence prints coming off the benches I think the team pulled it off very well as a result of our year-long efforts to like do this without dropping everything on the floor the result of our year-long efforts and is this 12 brand new shin hunka prints on time on budget now living in collections almost right from the first announcement a year ago this set was fully subscribed three of our printers combined to create and in the short run of about 200 sheets of each image but that was nowhere near enough to cover the demand we have been holding a waiting list of people who want to get these ever since with another printer now joining our team more about that in a minute or so we have now begun to pull more prints and are taking subscription orders for this set once again but that's not what I'm here to talk about today everybody wants to know what's next where do we go from here well it's push forward you know push forward we have a lot more practice a lot more learning to do there is no way we are going to back away from this concept now so for the coming year jedson and the team here are going to continue to work in the shin hunger genre for 2020 we are going to make another set of the same format same dimensions and basically we're going to remain with the same restrictions as to the number of blocks and colors so is it to be Japan journey volume 2 no we might do something like that at some point in the future but this time round we're going to mix it up a little rather than a jury this time we're gonna make a kind of pilgrimage where to well if I show you a few of the upcoming designs you should I think being able to catch the theme the first print in the set is now ready this is one of the sheets fresh from suicides bench upstairs as you can see it is a view of a quite well-known old yokan building with a red lacquered bridge in front like this place seem a tad familiar now the next few are of course not finished yet we are still carving them but I have some Photoshop mock-ups from Jetta where have you seen the steep hills of this Tokyo suburb and what does this European landscape seen from the air remind you of I think that most of you can see the thread here we are location hunting over the next 12 months this new set of beautiful prints will echo places that provided the inspiration for scenes in much-loved animated films it's kind of a woodblock pilgrimage now most of the 12th prince will indeed be set in Japan but because the animators took a wider world view of their settings and we will do the same and as you've just seen some of the designs take a more international approach I mentioned that I've been talking about this new series on the twitch stream and conversations there and in the shop where we've teased some of these that made me realize that this new series is going to be in heavy demand the sign up page is open right now at the URL you see here and of course also put that link on the video information page we very much hope you will find this project interesting our printers upstairs have mixed feelings about these new prints we've been making you know as I mentioned a few minutes ago Shin lager prints are a ton more work than the UK style work we've been making over the past years they take much more time per sheet simply because of the many color overlays but the ladies also have to admit they are learning new skills and we are all working together here to develop a kind of a company skill set that will allow us to publish larger and more elaborate prints of this type in the future more on that in a couple of minutes anyway as I mentioned the sign up page is now open we're standing by to send you a wonderful set of prints over the coming 12 months I should also add something here for people watching this video in the future all of our subscription series stay available indefinitely if you're watching this video in the future in 20 21 or 25 or anything you should still be able to get these prints from us including that set for example that you just saw check the website always for current availability what's the next new segment [Music] how many of you remember this ladies these video clips date back it's a few years I think perhaps the earliest video that she appeared in for us was back in November 2012 it's a full seven years ago this was our you Mimi Ashe da who is now Ayumi Ohashi she was doing wonderful work for us up until around two and a half years ago when she came to me one day with the news that she was becoming a mother and with us believing the workshop not my choice her choice we were all very saddened but I said we're saddened by that news she wasn't saddened by that and as we were all saddened by that news but this was tempered by the knowledge that at some point in the future she would be returning well here we are we are now at some point and I ume-san is back with us upstairs it's because of her grandmother and a local daycare center they're helping to care for young haruka-chan and IME son is now ready to get back in the saddle she can't work here full-time yet but anything she can do for us will be a tremendous help her initial project actually I mentioned a minute ago she's studying the work on another batch of prints from the blocks the last year's research to help us Chile about long waiting lists and we have many many wood blocks sleeping here just waiting to be brought back into action she's already gonna be a big help without we'll talk more about that in a minute fish yes we are very very glad to have her back with us here's a bit of video taken from one of the live streams we've run on the twitch platform these days I see stream three days a week with a 90-minute session usually showing the current work on my carving bench the block you see me working on here is the initial print in the 8 views of cats series the nickel hotkey that we introduced this past summer I've been very lacks and you keep the creeping updated on the progress of that project have I ever been lacks on that here's a little bullet point list PowerPoint of where it all stands the evening snow the first print and night rain the second bread they are in production up and running this series is really happening as I said by myself I'm covering the initial print and our young Carver Johnson who came to us from Hong Kong a few years ago he's already begun the next one stage 2 submissions I know there's 13 people I have now asked to move to stage 2 and seven of them have completed those submissions for me and they've been paid for that these are people who will be choosing the next group of prints from overall we've now got 1200 plus applications from people all over the world many many have been interesting of course there's some that are less so but even though there's lots of good ones in there I am still going to need more source material from which to select the total of 8 killer designs now for the first two themes the evening snow and night rain there's no point to send any more submissions for those because they're now closed we're carving but for all the other six themes I am still open for suggestions if you have an interest in this please visit the eight views website listed in the documentation for this video read up on the project and please consider sending in your design ideas the timetable this is happening on the original idea was to select all eight designs during the course of last summer and then start the production on them one by one by one but it turned out that that whole concept wasn't practical to do it that way so we've switched to a system where we're selecting one by one as we go through the project as I said the first two are selected and once carving on this number one gets near the end or I'll be selecting number three and so on so you'll be choosing designs even as the initial prints are already in the shop and out in the market subscriptions there's a ton of confusion about this because we have so many subscription prints a lot of people have assumed that the cat series is also going to be subscription set as I proposed back in the beginning this will not be such a thing it'll just be a themed group of prints in our catalog like the the Yukio heroes prints we have the rickshaw cart and the fox moon noise there might be people who end up getting all them and perhaps after it's all done a year from now whatever we might package it as a subscription series I guess but the whole concept is simply prints one by one by one so don't worry you're not going to have to buy them all please check the update page on the eight cats website to get a peek at the designs in stage two and then follow along over the next year or so as this thing gradually comes together it's going to be a killer set of prints once they're all done this is a photo that we put on our Instagram page a few weeks back and in this single image you can see one of the main reasons for my lack of video production here recently paperwork papers papers and more papers now I knew that the step of becoming a real company would involve a lot of extra paperwork but get serious I can't say it's been a nightmare because that would be an exaggeration but yes this has been a huge distraction for us we're not out of the woods yet because sometime over the next couple of weeks we have to take inventory here for the very first time and that means counting every single sheet of washi paper every print in every stack every piece of wood every packet of pigments and over in Oh me I've got a four-story building crammed with stuff built up over thirty thirty more years of printmaking activity so why are we taking this step of incorporating now it goes back a couple of years to this clip from a video I made in the spring of 2017 showing our business situation at the close of the previous year here's a printout of the chart you saw in that video I was in trouble her a sucks a shop the purple part of this video was kind of growing quite well but because of my work here in the shop I was ignoring all other important parts of our business they were decreasing everything was decreasing and we were slumping and overall the workload was killing me now a group of fans from the Netherlands came over guys who had actually visited previously and got to know me and they came over to Japan shortly before I made that video and they cornered me in a bar one night I mean literally they Jam me into a corner in the bar there where I couldn't move them couldn't get out they put some beers on the table and I was like what's going on it turned out they were worried about me they wanted to help how best could they do that they even made suggestions like Dave if you had like a pile of money in the table here how would that help you get out of this you know jam urine I didn't take any money from them but spurred by the discussion that evening and realizing that if I was able to clearly outline a way that could help this project move forward a lot of people would be happy to do so so given the experience of those guys cornering me that night I two years ago I went out to patria and I reached out for assistance in providing funding for me to hire someone to take over the bulk of my office type work now the community responded instantly based on that I started a search and as a regular view of our streams and videos no that's where Cameron came from he grabbed the office computer away from me took it for his own and completely and totally took over the order processing the subscription processing the rotation with our shipping center anomaly and all the communications with collectors and customers did it help well here we are two years later coming up to the end of 2019 did the patreon support did it help for reference here are these colors the green are our online orders through the website shopping cart the red segments here are the lucu a hero's prints you know the rich job the Fox mode de scope the yellow here growing substantially over the past few years is subscriptions and the purple of course is the success shop also growing steadily and here at the top this quite large group is the revenue from the patron contribution still making up an important part of our overall revenue now during the time that our business volume has been growing like this over these past couple years Cameron has begun to be paid from our general revenue so what I've done is I'm reallocating the patron income for a different purpose we still have no access to financing here to support anything that doesn't contribute immediately to income we can't get bank loans or capital or anything so we are using the patreon funding now for a more long-term project to help rebuild the broken supply chain for the materials we need for our work there's some photographs we now have nearly a hundred kilograms of inventory in our Mulberry savings banks up on the third floor of our workshop and look at this for massive chunks from a young as a curry tree a Japanese mountain cherry that we just purchased and which we will now begin to transform into carving blocks a process that will take three to four years at the very least now these kinds of expensive and long-term investments are very difficult to make from our general revenue so the ongoing patreon support is making a very big difference they're helping us to secure a more stable future as to the question of why I have made this move to become registered company this month I think it is obvious we now have more than 30 people working here and at that level of employment we are required to set up health insurance plans pension contributions or workplace insurance and you name it in an endless list of monthly forms to fill out and monthly payments to make I guess all in all perhaps what this really means is we have arrived you know a bunch of people now are making a living here they're getting married they're having babies not sure how much I should speak about this in public but even right now as I'm making this we have four staff members or family members who are busy making babies you know I mean I mean having babies and at the other end of it the production month after month after month we are sending out a steady stream of prints to the new homes everywhere old prints no prints reproductions originals we are making a difference bringing pleasure to people all over the world and having a ton of fun doing so we're working as hard as we can but none of this would be possible without the support from our fans friends customers everybody out there thank you very much I have no idea where we're going from here I mean growth like this this is obviously not sustainable what happens next I have no idea but anyway we'll see okay to finish off just one more thing a few minutes ago when I was talking about ie me son coming back to work I mentioned that there were a lot of carved wood boxes sleeping here waiting to be printed this is just a portion of them we've got stacks of them upstairs that are all ready to go but we just have not had enough printers on hand to get the work done let's just take a look at a few of these this stock it's a huge stock this is actually the blocks for the hanami cats design from jet more I speak of cats don't confuse this with the 8 views of cats series that we're doing this is a separate series that Jed conceived Jenna I can't remember who started the idea anyway they bought a year ago we started this project these are Photoshop mock-ups because we have no prints yet these are the hanami cats and the ramen cats and the first one I think that we came up with was the sushi cats design as I said the blocks are all waiting here we've had no chance to make you dishes but speaking of this sushi cats I got a package from one of our outside printers she had her son up in Nagano a couple of weeks ago we were talking about the year-end job planning and she had it turned out three or four days extra at the end of the year not enough time to do a main reel run of prints but enough time to do some extra work I thought she could do some proofing for me so I sent her the block set for the sushi cats print and here it came look at this now this is actually not totally finished there's going to be a gold embossed pattern on the kimono in the final version but I think you can get the idea here she has done a killer jaw the wood grain you probably can't see it on the distance here the wood grain is all embossed there's gradations under the counter and around everywhere and look how well she caught the translucency of that smoked glass on the counter what a beautiful beautiful production I tell you there hasn't been work of this complexity and quality anywhere for years for decades giannis on she'll be making the first batch for sale sometime in the new year into the early spring once they're ready Cameron will be letting everybody know through the usual routes our Instagram Facebook on the blog you know water then there's more you know this other stock here you probably can't see it because they're all so dark here Jed Sun and I about a half year ago we come up with the idea for another no series we're learning about the shin hunger things from our subscription prints we want to use that knowledge in larger prints so he has a Photoshop mock-up he came up with an idea he was up there a Chubin group of people dancing over at zenkoji temple the Photoshop mock-up the blocks are ready and it's just waiting for one of our printers to find time walks blocks another block said okay hey what's this is an octopus and a lady 99.99% carved just waiting for printing ain't we got fun that's enough for now I'll see you next time early in the new year with our next real video thanks for watching and good night for now

Channel: David Bull

Views: 81,332

Rating: 4.9768562 out of 5

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Id: x1jqYAri4E8

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 30 2019