Create a new original vertical Japanese shin-hanga-inspired color print, 2:3, for "La douceur des jours". The attached Hasui print is the style reference: study its large cut color shapes and modest human presence, NOT its signature, lettering, trees or composition. Do not reproduce it.
Design from scratch for a real 24 x 36 cm woodblock print with a deliberately restricted budget: a brown-black key block plus ONLY FIVE flat color ink families (indigo, asagi blue-green, subdued yellow ochre, warm gray and pale dusty pink). Paper cream is the seventh visible tone. Reuse these same inks across figures and setting. The drawing must be sparse, economical and cuttable. Just 5–8 main folds per robe, 3–4 lines for eyes nose mouth, faces as flat warm paper, no cheek modeling. No fine hairs, hatching, tiny foliage, elaborate embroidery, or detailed texture. Only a very slight natural paper tooth, never a speckled aging overlay. One subtle broad bokashi in sky or water, nowhere else. Crisp moderately thin contours only where needed; not a comic outline around every area.
Compose the person at 35–45% of picture height. Keep roughly HALF of the image as uninterrupted quiet air, water, wall or floor, with almost no internal strokes. Landscape is two or three simple interlocking colored planes. The beauty comes from rhythm, intervals and tenderness, not detail.
Human feeling is essential: adult kindness, gentleness, candid ease, relaxed brows, a quiet personal expression; no caricature, no forced grin or adorable child face. Preserve period and essential action described below but invent a fresh balanced spacious composition. No cinematic light, no airbrushed gradients, no pulp illustration, no glamour, no photorealism. No text, seals or signatures. Full opaque image.
SCENE: Ariwara no Narihira, young adult Japanese courtier, clean-shaven and long-faced, gently landing barefoot from a low boat onto a wooden pontoon; one foot securely on the plank and the other still inside the boat. He turns affectionately toward a companion and takes the companion's one extended hand for balance. Show a clear anatomically readable clasp of exactly two hands, one per person. Iris clump near the bank; a plain Heian cap and restrained soft gray-mauve robe with just a sparse small geometric motif. His expression is trusting and tender, mouth relaxed. Broad calm asagi water, a reed bank, no dramatic sunset. Open diagonal composition.