Suminagashi

Take a shallow tray a little larger than your paper and fill it 3-5 cm deep. The depth is irrelevant — everything that happens, happens on the surface film.

Leave the filled tray for half an hour until the surface is completely still. You cannot draw a circle on moving water.

Cold water will not let the ink spread. Water close to room temperature spreads most readily.

Two fine brushes: one for ink, one for the repellent. Never let them mix — once they do, neither brush works properly again.

Grind sumi ink on a stone and keep it slightly dilute. Ink that is too thick is heavy and sinks instead of floating.

Charge the second brush with pine resin — or, failing that, a very dilute dish detergent. The surfactant lowers the water's surface tension locally and pushes the ink aside.

Bring the ink brush tip gently onto the water. Do not push it in. The moment it touches, the ink opens into a circle.

Touch the repellent brush to the centre of the circle you just made. The ink is driven outward into a ring. Miss the centre and the rings will not be concentric.

Ink, repellent, ink, repellent, always at the same centre. Twenty or thirty rings build up. Count as you go and you can reproduce it later.

Once the rings are there, breathe gently across the water or fan it. The rings drift into a grain like wood. This single move is the "flowing" in the name.

Lower washi from the centre outward onto the surface. There is no second attempt — lift it and the pattern is destroyed.

Wait two or three seconds, take an edge and lift at a steady speed. Too fast and the pattern smears; too slow and the paper takes up too much water.

Lay newspaper on the water to lift off leftover ink and oil. Whatever remains from the last pattern will show up in the next one.

Dry the sheet flat rather than hanging it. Hung up, the ink runs downward with the water and the rings stretch.

Make ten prints the same way and lay them out. No two are alike. That it cannot be repeated is not a failure — it is the nature of the technique.

Paper of the Heian court. Suminagashi was practised in Japan in the Heian period, some twelve centuries ago. It was used mainly by the aristocracy, for the decorated papers on which poetry was written and for official documents. It is a technique for ornamenting paper, developed at a time when paper itself was precious.

The name says what it is. Ink, and flowing. Not drawn — floated. The word describes the method exactly.

The resin does the work. Ink alone simply spreads and disperses. Alternating a resin-charged brush pushes the ink aside so it survives as a ring — a surfactant lowering surface tension locally, which is also why modern practitioners can substitute dilute detergent. The pattern is made by the repellent, not by the ink.

Different from Western marbling. Turkish ebru and European marbled papers float colours on a thickened size — gum tragacanth and the like — and comb them into intended designs. Suminagashi works on plain water, uses no comb, and does not control the pattern. Same idea of floating and lifting; opposite philosophy.

Choosing not to control. Ten sheets give ten different results. Other traditions would treat that as a defect; suminagashi treats it as the point. The maker sets the conditions and the water sets the form — and that division of labour has not moved in twelve hundred years.