Style combination · Contrasts
Rinpa × Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints
Ukiyo-e carves a keyline, prints in editions for the city and depicts actors and courtesans; Rinpa paints pooled colour on gold for a few patrons and depicts plants, waves and birds. Choose between the street print and the gilded screen before settling a Japanese look.
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Rinpa & Saga-bon Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints
- Type from Rinpa
- Colour from Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints
- Form from Rinpa
- Composition from Rinpa
- Surface from Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Rinpa
Rose
Shippori Mincho, standing in for Saga-bon wooden movable type: flowing hiragana mixed with kanji, cut mostly as single characters but also as linked sorts of two, three and four characters, after a hand in Kōetsu's manner
Text · Rinpa
A Kyoto school of decorative design that revived the poetry and court painting of the Heian period, begun around 1600 by the calligrapher Hon'ami Kōetsu and the painter Tawaraya Sōtatsu and carried on less by teaching than by admiration across generations: Ogata Kōrin, Sakai Hōitsu, Kamisaka Sekka. A few plants, waves or birds are enlarged, simplified, cropped and repeated across open gold or silver grounds, colour is pooled wet into wet (tarashikomi), poems are brushed over decorated paper, and the same motifs pass to screens, fans, lacquer, kimono and the movable-type Saga-bon books.
Shippori Mincho; Rinpa used Kōetsu's brush hand and Saga-bon wooden movable type
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints, with a counter-accent from Rinpa. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Rinpa & Saga-bon Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints
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#efe5cfground · 36% -
#1d1b18ink · 14% -
#c64a2daccent · 18% -
#d4a64aaccent · 14% -
#1f3f7aaccent · 10% -
#d98c8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe5cf;
--ink: #1d1b18;
--accent-1: #c64a2d;
--accent-2: #d4a64a;
--accent-3: #1f3f7a;
--accent-4: #d98c8c;
--font-display: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}Use it with care
Rinpa & Saga-bon: Poems on Rinpa works and Saga-bon pages are real Japanese texts: have any kana or kanji written or set and checked by a fluent reader, and never fill a design with pseudo-calligraphy as texture. Do not present a generated gold screen as a historical work or as a copy of a named National Treasure. A Kōrin-style plum or wave can be crest-like, but keep it free of any real family's, shrine's or temple's mon.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Rinpa
- Kamon (Japanese Family Crests) Pairs well · Kōrin patterns reduce a plum or a wave to an emblem much as a mon does; pair a crest-like Rinpa motif with a large open ground for packaging, keeping it free of any real family's crest.
- Art Nouveau Pairs well · Kamisaka Sekka was sent to Glasgow in 1901 and came back influenced by Art Nouveau, which he joined to Rinpa subjects; pair Rinpa's cropped irises and waves with Art Nouveau's floral lettering for a botanical label or poster.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Contrasts · Both come from Kyoto's tea culture (Kōetsu also made Raku tea bowls), but wabi-sabi wants rough clay and empty paper where Rinpa wants gold leaf and malachite; one bare field can serve either, so choose the material that fills it.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Tanaka Ikkō drew many 1960s–70s posters from Rinpa and has been called a 20th-century Rinpa artist, and in 2015 ten Japanese graphic designers made Rinpa posters, Hara Kenya's on real gold leaf: add a gold ground and a single cropped seasonal motif to a modernist grid for warmth and seasonality.
- Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) Pairs well · Both enlarge a plant motif, crop it at the edge and repeat it across cloth; take Rinpa's metallic ground and pooled colour into a bold printed textile.
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Contrasts · The Ming/Mincho book letter is upright, separate and set square in a ruled grid; Saga-bon type is flowing kana linked across sorts on decorated paper. Use Mincho for running text and a Saga-bon-like hand for titles and poems.
- Vienna Secession Contrasts · Both set flat figures and pattern on gold, but the Secession locks them into frames and grids while Rinpa leaves the gold open and lets one motif drift across it; decide whether the gold should be a frame or a field.
- Japonisme Contrasts · Japonisme learned Japan mostly from woodblock prints, with keylines and flat colour on paper, though Kōrin reached Louis Gonse and Siegfried Bing in the 1880s through Hōitsu's Kōrin hyakuzu, and Gonse's L'Art japonais (1883) ranked him among the best decorative artists; borrow Rinpa's open gold ground and repeated plant motif to give a Japonist layout more space and shine.
With Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints
- Japonisme Pairs well · Its direct European heir: combine ukiyo-e cropping and flat colour with Western display lettering for a Japonisme poster.
- Belle Époque Lithographic Poster Pairs well · Use the flat silhouette and keyline of ukiyo-e inside a lithographic poster, as Toulouse-Lautrec did, to read at a distance.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Reduce ukiyo-e motifs to flat emblems on a strict grid to get the postwar Japanese blend of tradition and modernism.
- Renaissance Book Typography Contrasts · Set an off-centre, edge-cropped print against a symmetric classical text block to stage East-West contrast deliberately.
- Kamon (Japanese Family Crests) Pairs well · Kabuki actors had their own mon, and actor prints show them on the costume, as on the sleeve of Ichikawa Yaozō III in a print of 1796; pair a flat crest with ukiyo-e figures to identify characters without captions.
- Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics Contrasts · Ukiyo-e is carved line, urban pleasure and diagonal drama; Serizawa is a stencil edge, rural work and calm panel grids.
- Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration Pairs well · Yumeji's beauties continue the bijin-ga print; pair a woodblock-printed pattern ground with a lyrical modern figure.
- Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit Printmaking Contrasts · Houston studied with the sōsaku-hanga printmaker Un'ichi Hiratsuka in 1958–59, and Kinngait shares ukiyo-e's hand-rubbed relief, Japanese paper, margin seals and a split between designer, cutter and printer (which sōsaku hanga itself rejected); but ukiyo-e fills a cropped scene inside a carved keyline with cartouche text, while Kinngait usually floats a few silhouettes on open paper, so use ukiyo-e for a full scene and Kinngait for a lone presence.