"Osuitok's desire to learn the process led Houston to introduce Japanese woodblock techniques to the Cape Dorset artists, but because of the scarcity of wood in the Arctic, they adopted the much older Japanese techniques of stone-block printing. However, the variations in the shapes of the stone blocks (and the subsequent problems in the exact registration of additional blocks for each colour) led to the move to the stencil technique. At first, sealskin was used for the stencil templates, but it was abandoned in favour of waxed paper, a version of which is now used."
—excerpt from Cape Dorset Sculpture