Photo Print Calendar From Yokohama Download
Patricia Strawbridge
I know that it is probably relatively late to start a project like that but I wanted to send few calendars with photos to friends. The plan is to create a wall calendar - A4 size. On the page, there will be the month and one or more photos. I am planning to prepare the template with PagePlusx4, then export each page as a picture, and finally print with Qimage.
I make a number of completely individualized family photo calendars each year as Xmas presents. I use 11 x 17 Red River UltraPro Gloss paper....quite heavy. Heavy eough that if one wanted they could later cut the calendar off and frame the 8.5 x 11 top picture. I get a generic monthly calendar template off the web as a jpg....calendar bottom half..then add picture top half and print in Photoshop. This year I had some excellent portrait oriented pictures with the top half being the more interesting, faces, etc.. I pulled the picture as 10.5 x 16.5, added white background to 11 x 17, split in half, overlaid the bottom half over the calendar and reduced opacity to 45% so both the pictue and calendar were visible, joined the full opacity top half, flattened layers and printed. That worked out very nicely.
I use double sided heavy weight matte paper for calendars. In the past I've used Epson's Double-sided Matte Photo Inkjet Paper, 9.7 mil. This year I'm using 11.7 mil double sided matte paper from Adorama, their Projet brand. The Adorama paper is probably not available to you, but the Epson should be.
Like Tom, I use double-sided matt 190gsm photo-paper - all papers with glossy finishes do curl badly and often present ptoblems with feeding in the printer. Because of the calendar use as such, I simply get a good quality double-sided inkjet paper. Most suppliers of ink cartridges have such in stock at inexpensive prices. OK for dye or pigment inks.
Lomography's LomoChrome '92 is designed to mimic the look of classic drugstore film that used to fill family photo albums. As we discovered, to shoot with it is to embrace the unexpected, from strange color shifts to odd textures and oversized grain.
Yokohama prints are rather rare and therefore often expensive. When it comes to quality, collectors should be willing to make some compromises. The impressions of many Yokohama prints are often fair to poor. Either too many impressions were made from one block or they were hastily and sloppily produced to meet the high demand of the market.
The Library acquired its Japanese woodblock print holdings from a host of different donors and collectors including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, President William Howard Taft, Crosby Stuart Noyes, and Emily Crane Chadbourne.
Many schools, traditions, and genres are represented, notably surimono, privately distributed prints combining pictures and poetry, and prints from the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars. However, the primary strengths of the collection are the Japanese art forms known as Ukiyo-e and Yokohama-e.
Crosby Stuart Noyes, an owner and editor-in-chief of the former Washington Evening Star, assembled what is now the Library's most extensive collection of Ukiyo-e, including about 1,300 prints, drawings, and illustrated books. More than 100 works from the Library's full collection of about 2500 Ukiyo-e prints are currently online. The Library of Congress exhibition The Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance featured many of the prints, and the exhibition website includes additional information about collection themes and specific works.
For Japanese artists, the port city of Yokohama became an incubator for a new category of images that straddled convention and novelty. Building on methods of production and marketing established by Ukiyo-e artists and publishers, Edo print publishers began to send artists to Yokohama to sketch foreigners in situ. Bewhiskered men and crinoline-clad women were shown striding through the city, clambering on and off ships, riding horses, enjoying local entertainments, and interacting with an endless array of objects from goblets to locomotives.
Anamoephosis was called kyochuga or saya-e. The picture looks strange at first glance, but when viewed in the reflection on a curved surface, such as that of a sword case (saya), it could be seen in its true proportions. This technique was learned from Europe and was popular during the mid Edo period. This image is from 1783 calendar, and the number of spots in the rabbits (1783 was the year of the rabbit among the twelve horary signs) , i.e. 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, and 11 show the long months. Belonged to the Kabutoyama Collection (Japanese).
These are two kinds of calico illustrated calendars. Calico was an imported luxury good, and even scraps were carefully saved. Kafu kogiri is designed looking like a calico scrap book. Sarasa kamiire is looking like a wallet made from calico. Inside the pattern, can be seen the numbers representing the short months.
These are two kinds of calendars made by copperplate etching. Copperplate etching became increasingly popular since it was used by Shiba Kokan, and was used to print maps, illustrations in medical books, travel guides, and other applications. These abbreviated calendar is for the two years of 1848 and 1849, and is a strange calendar with a problem of mathematics written at the top and the six planets of Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus drawn in the middle. The history of the creator, Morita Masaki, is unknown. The other is a pictorial puzzle calendar. On the guards of the long and short swords are respectively written the numbers for the long months and the short months, and the 'flying bird' (higan) in the long sword guard is the pun of 'higan' (equinox), and so it functions as a pictograph.
A 'direct viewing' type of peepshow, in which a picture was placed at one end of a dark box and then was peered at through a convex lens, was popular in the West from the mid 17th century, and came to Japan via China. By the mid 18th century, the 'reflection viewing' type where glasses were worn was invented in France and spread in Japan through trade with the Netherlands to obtain the equipment and copperplate eyeglass prints. Pictures drawn in perspective, their foreground are viewed like floating, so at the time they were popular attractions called ukie (floating pictures).
This is one picture from a nishiki-e print series by Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864). The colorful frame is in Western style. The note at the upper right of the picture, "Motome ni yorite Kunisata egaku". (I drew this at the request) is written in hiragana (Japanese syllabary) horizontally, imitating Western writing style. A copperplate print style expression can be seen in the scene of the clouds and background.
Stylized snowflake patterns of the snow crystals introduced in Sekka zusetsu (these are also called 'oimoyo' (oi patterns) because the creator, Doi Toshitsura, was an Oinokami) can also be seen in nishiki-e prints. This picture shows a woman wearing a kimono with snowflake patterns walking as snow falls, depicting the poem of Emperor Koko "I went into the spring meadow to gather young shoots for you as snowflakes alight on my sleeve" from the Ogura Hyakunin isshu (100 peems by 100 poets).
Eisen was the first person in Japan to try blue print using Prussian blue. Only the lips of the prostitute are shown in red against a sky feathered from dark to light blue to enhance her charm. This print is an adaptation from the nishiki-e print titled Sugata Ebiya rojo no zu, and uses the technique of leaving the human figures unchanged while using blue print to change the background.
In 1765, new technology made it possible to produce single-sheet prints in a whole range of colors. Printmakers who had heretofore worked in monochrome and painted the colors in by hand, or had printed only a few colors, gradually came to use full polychrome painting to spectacular effect. The first polychrome prints, or nishiki-e, were calendars made on commission for a group of wealthy patrons in Edo, where it was the custom to exchange beautifully designed calendars at the beginning of the year.
Polychrome prints were made using a separate carved block for each color, which could number up to twenty. To print with precision using numerous blocks on a single paper sheet, a system of placing two cuts on the edge of each block to serve as alignment guides was employed. Paper made from the inner bark of mulberry trees was favored, as it was strong enough to withstand numerous rubbings on the various woodblocks and sufficiently absorbent to take up the ink and pigments. Reproductions, sometimes numbering in the thousands, could be made until the carvings on the woodblocks became worn.
At Bakumatsuya, we deal in rare books, manuscripts, dictionaries and phrase books, photos, woodblock prints, maps and other printed items relating to Japan mostly from the 1600s to the 1930s with a special interest in items from the 1850s to 1870s when Japan was opening up to the West. Our clients include private collectors, dealers, museums, universities and other institutions both public and private in Japan and overseas.
In addition to being able to print from the library's computers, print jobs can also be sent via our web printing portal. Upon signing in, just follow the instructions on the page to submit a job that can be released from any of the printers listed above, or any printers that support GINGER* on campus (a list of valid printers will also be given in the portal).
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