Increasing familiarity with Japanese color woodcuts led Dow to a simplified style of painting in which traditional modeling and perspective were eliminated in favor of flat, decorative compositions. For Dow, the basic elements of design became line, color, and notan (Japanese for the arrangement of lights and darks). Although Dow's woodcuts clearly emulated the Japanese mode, they were not slavish imitations, but personal and formally imaginative experiments. He referred to impressions from his blocks as "colour themes" and considered the woodcut:

"a painter's art, for creative colour is the aim and purpose of the whole thing. It is a free craft, for the artist is his own engraver, printer, and publisher producing, by hand, single prints, no two alike. Colour variation has always fascinated me. There is a particular pleasure in seeing the same design appear in different colours – the design seems to have a soul in each colour scheme."