First Love No.3

This second impression of First Love No.3 represents either an alternate state of the third design in Okamoto's series or a separate printing run with subtle variations in inking and color. Such alternative impressions are an established feature of mokuhanga practice, where artists routinely pull successive states of the same blocks with different color choices, paper variants, or registration adjustments. Like other prints in the First Love sequence, the composition is built from multiple woodblocks carved by hand and registered onto [washi](/glossary/washi) paper, with each block contributing a separate color layer through [baren](/glossary/baren) application. Okamoto's command of registration produces clean alignment across the layered impressions. Within his broader catalog of botanical studies and landscape views, the First Love prints inhabit a more figurative and emotionally suggestive register, and the existence of variant impressions of No.3 testifies to how closely he attended to the early designs in the series.