Layered Ink

Depth here is cumulative, never declared. The plate is built from seven passes of heavily diluted sumi ink, each drawn top to bottom with a wide flat brush and left to dry completely before the next begins. No pass is dark on its own. Held to the light after the first, the paper looks barely touched. Only by the seventh does the field gather into bands of tone, some strokes overlapping four or five times, others just once.

The vertical direction is fixed and never varied. This is the point: the hand repeats a single motion until the repetition, not the individual stroke, becomes the image. Small misregistrations between passes leave soft edges where two strokes almost, but not quite, align. Those near-misses are where the plate breathes.

I keep a plain log beside the easel — pass number, dilution, drying time — because the method is the work and the method must be recoverable:

pass 1  1:12 ink:water   dry 40m
pass 2  1:10             dry 45m
pass 3  1:10             dry 50m
pass 4  1:8              dry 60m

By pass seven the dilution tightens to 1:5, but only in the strokes that already carry weight. The lightest columns are never revisited. They stay as first evidence that a hand once passed through.