Today is for whimsy, not just one print, but an interesting printing technique.
Gyotaku. Japanese fish printing! You take a real fish, brush it with ink or paint, press rice paper against it, and then peel it off. Sounds simple, but I imagine it’s a good deal harder to do than it sounds. It was apparently invented in the latter half of the nineteenth century and originally used by Japanese fishermen to document their catches. (Maybe better than taxidermy?)
Here are a couple of examples from a teacher’s blog.
You can do this with any kind of fish–squid, octopus, etc. I’ve seen beautiful examples with tortoises, and finally, shells. The shell print below and several others are available on Etsy, in a shop called iGyotaku.
