Tadashi Nakayama's woodcuts often feature metallic inks or gold leaf overlaid on dark browns, blacks, and blues, taking inspiration from Persian miniatures that he observed on his many travels throughout the Middle East. He would often do a first run of a dark field of color and layer the others on top. Here, a metallic ink with a subtle sheen warms the background's deep earth brown.
Tadashi Nakayama tinkered meticulously with his prints. His love for detail required an extraordinary number of printing matrices and print processes. Additionally he applied the gold and silver metal leaves using a method he developed himself. To reach such a degree of perfection, Nakayama first completely designed his images using watercolor that plots out the compositions of each woodcut exactly.
Nakayama went even further. His upper layers seldom have an opaque consistency. The colors are often glazed in multiple layers, applied just on top, creating a vivid whole that has the clear colors contrasting with diffuse brilliance.