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context: painting > prints > technical
The Cutter
The cutter: this is an obvious and immense artistic contribution - take a look at the hair in an Utamaro courtesan print, and imagine the craft involved in cutting that. The artist would provide a drawing, and the cutter would carve a block - generally destroying the original drawing on the way, which I mention in case you have an attachment to the idea of 'an original' in art. There are some 'originals' left, but it's not at all clear whether they were the basis of the cutting, or they were redrawn afterwards, or the artist did two in the first place... Whatever, once the cutter had something that worked, the artist would colour in a test print, and the cutter started again, cutting a whole series of colour blocks, not uncommonly running into double figures (some fuss was made about Harunobu being the first to use 15 colours). This was a highly skilled and complex task, especially once people started to grasp how overprinting could combine the colours to offer a far richer palette from a small number of blocks.
Note that successful prints went through multiple sets of blocks, being recut as necessary. This means that the image varies slightly, and the quality and style of the colour printing varies even from the same set of blocks. The excellent John Fiorillo offers a superb example of two very different printings of the same image. If you go to his FAQ, there is far more detail on the techniques involved in printing than I could offer.