Carlos Sifuentes Haro

A portrait print of Carlos Sifuentes Haro, executed in the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock technique (mokuhanga) that Gil Alares practices from her studio in Zaragoza. Portraiture in mokuhanga requires careful planning across multiple cherry or shina plywood blocks, with kentō registration marks ensuring each color layer aligns within fractions of a millimeter. Skin tones are typically built from successive thin passes of pigment mixed with rice paste (nori) and water, hand-burnished into dampened washi with a [baren](/glossary/baren). The medium lends itself to soft tonal transitions through [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), where pigment is graded across the block before printing — useful for modeling facial planes without harsh outlines. As a contemporary practitioner documented in the Mokumap directory of Mokuhanga Magic, Gil Alares represents a strand of the European mokuhanga community that adapts the historically Japanese technique — once dominated by [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) subjects such as [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) — to portrait subjects drawn from her own contemporary milieu.