The Japanese woodblock print — known as ukiyo-e in its most celebrated form — was not the product of a single artist's hand but of a sophisticated collaborative production process involving a designer, a carver, a printer, and a publisher, each contributing a distinct and highly specialized expertise to the finished work. The process began with the designer, typically the artist whose name the print would carry, producing a detailed ink drawing on thin paper. This drawing was then pasted face-down onto a block of cherry wood — the paper rendered translucent with oil to make the lines visible — and a master carver would cut away the wood around every line of the design with extraordinary precision, leaving the image raised in relief on the block's surface. This first block, called the key block, printed the outlines of the composition in black ink and served as the registration guide for every subsequent color. For each color in the final print a separate block was carved, and the printer would ink each block in turn with water-based pigments and press dampened sheets of washi paper against them in careful sequence, aligning each impression to the registration marks cut into the corners of every block. A print requiring ten colors demanded ten separate carvings and ten separate pressings, each perfectly aligned to the last. The result, in the hands of masters like Hokusai and Hiroshige, was an image of remarkable chromatic subtlety and tonal range — gradations of color achieved through a technique called bokashi, in which pigment was applied unevenly to the block before printing to produce soft atmospheric blends that remain among the most beautiful effects in the history of printmaking.