Jp Handpainted-Highlights-On-Brown-Collotype Postcards

I just acquired my 3rd Japanese handpainted-highlights-on-brown-collotype postcard. Sadly, the other two are buried in The Pile(s)

More sadly still, my scan does not begin to do justice to these very pretty cards:

- The brown collotype background is soft & mellow.

- The black highlights (eg, the trees, shrubs, etc) are thickly hand-inked, and very glossy.

- The gold highlights (eg, the nearer birds, the sail accents, the hut's roof, etc) are very pretty, very precise, and just about invisible in the scan. Ouch.

About the only thing I dare guess is that the cards are privately produced, as they are without indicia, etc.

Q/ Has anybody got anything to say about the text printed on the back of this card?

Q/ Has anybody got any similar cards?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Very nice, nicely muted colors!

This might be all done by hand or screen printing or most probably here, both. The sky is then probably screen printed, the islands could be stencils though often just loosely copied for position, the rest done by brush. So there could be loads produced quickly and all are just a little different from one another. I am reminded of a line of multicolor views in this style on covers from Japan, known from (I think) the 1920s and 1930s. There is a name attached to them, the seller I think. Someone here can probably give the name -- (I think) Carl/Karl... .

Someone else can give the kanji reading, but the last characters (left side) read HABANA, which I guess is Havana. The leftmost thing is a dragonfly and not a character, I believe.

It just says "Yuubin Hagaki" i.e. "Post Card." The shapes of the characters are kinda funky, and without context I would have been totally lost. Hy-brasil got the "HA" right, but what he interpreted as "BANA" is actually "GA", and the dragonfly is "KI". I can easily see how he misread it, though. It's a strange mix of characters, too: the HA and KI are katakana, but the GA is hiragana, which has an extra stroke that the katakana version of GA doesn't have.

Here's my one card of this sort. The Japanese inscription on mine says the same thing, but with more conventional-looking characters. On mine, however, "hagaki" is written entirely in hiragana, and the dakuten on the "ka" (the two little strokes that explicitly mark it as "ga") is absent. In older writing, the dakuten was used more sporadically than it is today; you can see a similar omission of the dakuten on the Japanese postal cards of 1876, for example.

Nice postal card ikey
Looks like a volcano in the background.

It is a volcano. It's Mount Fuji, which most recently erupted in 1707 and could still do so today.

Very Nice! Impressive details.

Thank you, one and all!

hy-brasil: I don't see any of the artifacts of screen printing (dots, etc); instead, there are the light, wispy, irregular lines you see in one type of collotype & related techniques.

http://www.metropostcard.com/tech0.html ... Postcard Printing Techniques

The 2400 dpi scan below (actually an algorithmically-assisted 1200 dpi optical scan) does not reveal what I see with my 22x-loupe-assisted naked eye, but at these resolutions you would clearly see the dots of a halftone etc.

Re the trees, there might have been some kind of mask used, to lend consistency from card-to-card - and to speed things along - but the black highlights are thickly & irregularly deposited, precisely what you would expect from the dabbing of a paintbrush.

erilaz: Thanks for alphabets!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana ... katakana

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana ... hiragana

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I just got two more postcards of this sort. These are more like ikeyPikey's, with Fuji-san in the picture.

I love these cards even if the common elements repeat with their delicate variations on a theme.

This one had an entirely blank back. Go figure.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

These were posted elsewhere, but I'll add them here.