Ancient crafts give designers a heritage of creative ideas

In cooperation with the Guangling printing house, designers of Canal Towns created a short video showcasing how the craftspeople at the printing house printed a figure from the game, starting from the carving of an image on a wooden block. A master of this skill introduces the cultural heritage technique. The video is embedded in the game so that when people play the game, they can learn about this ancient intangible heritage.

Posted on the micro-blogging account of the game, the video has been viewed more than 1 million times, with many viewers leaving comments that they wanted woodblock printing products. This prompted the second cooperation between the game's producers and the printing house.

"We thought the best product would be a single-page calendar, which is popular at the end of a year," says Gu Xiaoci, who entered the printing house in 2007 to study the craft and is familiar with the cooperation.

The game creators designed the calendar's pattern, in the middle of which is an image of the Lord Rabbit, as 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit, surrounded by figures from the game in addition to traditional propitious symbols, such as dragon and fish.

In total, there are eight colors on the calendar that were printed one after another on eight different blocks.

In a little over two months around the New Year of 2023, when COVID-19 hit many cities in China, one printer worked day and night to create the 1,200 copies of the calendar that quickly sold out on online shopping platform Taobao.

"Printing 1,200 copies is the limit for a set of woodblocks because every time you brush over the paper, it will rub away the lines that carve the details in the wood so that the lines printed on paper will appear thicker and thicker and some very thin ones will break," Gu says.

"When topping the colors, we need to let the woodblocks take a break because otherwise they will deform and the colors will not match the delicate lines," he says.

The calendar is just one of the efforts that the printing house has been working on to innovatively apply this ancient printing technique for use in modern times.