Natalia Rojas

A portrait of Natalia Rojas rendered in mokuhanga, the water-based woodblock technique Gil Alares works in from her studio in Zaragoza. Unlike oil-based relief printing, mokuhanga uses pigments bound with water and rice paste, applied to blocks with a brush and printed by hand-rubbing dampened washi with a [baren](/glossary/baren). This produces softer color saturation and allows multiple thin layers to build depth without the surface buildup of an inked print. Portraits in this medium often rely on [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) — graded color applied across the block face before printing — to model volumes that would otherwise require crosshatching impossible in flat-color woodblock. Multiple blocks must be cut and aligned with kentō registration notches to keep each layer in position. Gil Alares's listing in the Mokumap directory maintained by Mokuhanga Magic places this work within a broader international network of practitioners outside Japan who have adopted the technique, contributing to a contemporary expansion of mokuhanga subject matter beyond the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e), [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e), and [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) categories of the Edo period.