Kurashiki Design Atsuko Yukawa Copperplate Painting Small Cup (Little Bird and Cat/Pink) (Set of 6)

Product specifications: Approximately 8 cm in diameter x 5 cm in height Porcelain Production area: Gifu Prefecture
Product description: Copperplate painted cup
Atsuko Yukawa x Maruchi Seizo

I believe that one of the major changes in ceramic production during the Meiji period was the use of printing and painting, which made manual mass production possible. The most representative technique among these is ``copperplate painting'' (copperplate transfer), which is a technique in which a copperplate image printed on washi paper is transferred onto an unglazed vessel surface.
This technique, which tends to cause uneven copying and coloring, is only practiced in a limited number of factories today, but even in the case of copperplate painting that continues today, in most cases copperplates are not actually used. It is called silk screen printing, and it usually uses a finely textured fabric such as silk as a plate and prints ink through the grain of the fabric. Unlike copper plates, where patterns are drawn by hand using iron brushes, silk screen printing uses film that has been photographed of the original image and is printed directly onto the fabric plate, making it possible to faithfully reproduce the original image without the need for hand-painting craftsmen.
Silk screen printing is a very effective method for making plates for copperplate painting more easily, but it has one drawback. Since ink is printed through the grain of the fabric, it is not possible to make a line thinner than one square of the grain of the fabric.
Now, here comes Atsuko Yukawa's miniature painting.
I have written about illustrator Yukawa's tear-jerking obsession with animals, especially birds, which are the subjects of his miniature paintings, in the Kurashiki Design Branch Catalog ``Stories of 22 Creatures of Creatures'' and the Kurashiki Design Planning Department Paper Products Catalog 5 ``Book Lover Special Feature'', so please refer to them.
What I tried to make this time was to paint a miniature painting by Atsuko Yukawa on copperplate on an ultra-thin container called an eggshell made by Marunai Pottery. It's a gentle yet detailed line drawing, so naturally,
Copperplate painting requires the original copperplate.
A copperplate engraver copies Yukawa's original drawing with an iron brush onto a copper plate coated with wax, and then immerses it in acid, which corrodes only the areas where the wax has peeled off. Copperplate prints drawn with iron brushes are distinctive in that all shading is represented by diagonal lines. This is printed as an intaglio and becomes transfer paper.
Next, the washi transfer paper is wetted with water and applied with a brush to the curved surface of the container to transfer the design.Marunao Seizo has one of the most delicate techniques in Japan to minimize unevenness in the transfer.