Silk-screen printing originated in Japan and evolved from the traditional art of stencil printing on fabric, called "bingata." Screen-printing is produced by coating a silk screen with a photo-sensitive emulsion. The ink is then forced through the stencil. Tanaka uses paper stencils and each screen lays down one color. If the original art has ten colors it must be printed ten times using ten different screens.

The term "serigraphy" was coined in 1940 by Anthony Velonis who was working as the head of the WPA Fine Art Project. He had many talented artists working in this government project and he wanted to distinguish their fine silk-screened posters from the ordinary silk-screeners. His effort to differentiate "creative art" in silk-screen from the usual commercial application would benefit the artists working for the WPA and eventually artists like Albers, Stella, Motherwell and Warhol.

Authentic serigraphs are prints hand-made solely by the artist himself. Tanaka's serigraphs often take weeks of painstaking work to produce. Each one is printed on museum-quality acid-free Japanese and French paper. He is a master artist and a master printer who produces each work to his exacting standards which must conform to his artistic sensitivity. Each serigraph possesses incredible beauty and many have a stunning gold metallic ink that gives them an astonishing quality, rarely seen in serigraphs and silk-screen prints.