For my final editorial design lab I was asked to re-design a Japanese book, “Diary of a mad old man” by Junichiro Tanizaki. As explained in my thesis, this book’s illustrations changed from the original woodcuts to a more suitable kind of image, an abstract representation of the novel’s themes such as madness, female curves, feet and passion. The Japanese art of Suminagashi was the perfect way to illustrate the book: the artist has very little control on the support he draws on, and every piece of art comes out different than the previous one, even if the intention and the hand behind are the same. Yet you can still obtain a certain figurativism creating moving pictures of nature, weather or elements describing novels and pieces of poetry.

Suminagashi literally means “floating ink”, in fact it’s a technique resulted from calligraphy, where the author pinches the water with a dipped brush letting a little part of colour flow on the surface in a rounded shape. Alternating different inks or oils, to maintain the transparency of water, hundreds of concentric circles fill the space and change aspect continuously. When the artist’s mind is deeply relaxed and finds out the picture to be complete, this is printed simply by putting a piece of paper (usually washi) on the water’s surface. Because of its nature, washi absorbs water and traps ink very quickly. After drying for some minutes the work is ready to be used as a painting or as a sheet of paper for calligraphy.

Here the technique I used to print images for Tanizaki’s book: