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: Sugawara no Michizane, mature Japanese scholar with broad cheeks and a small moustache, Heian cap, leans toward a low writing table while holding one sheet of paper in one hand and steadying a short stack of books with the other. No extra hands. A quiet, benign, slightly distracted working face; not solemnly heroic. Soft gray-violet robe with few clear folds. Beyond the simple open veranda, both a small blooming ume and a quiet pine silhouette are recognizable, without crowded foliage. Gray weather, paper-white air, muted green and blue-gray planes. Floor is dry with just a few straight plank lines; no reflected glow. Keep landscape sparse.