How Do You Print a Picture From Wood? Cutting Away Everything That Stays White

In relief printing the areas that will appear as ink are left standing and everything else is cut away, which is the opposite of engraving where the ink sits in incised lines. A design is drawn or transferred onto a smooth block, the artist or a specialist cutter removes the wood around every line, and ink is applied to the remaining surface with a roller or a pad so that it touches only the raised parts. Paper is laid on and pressure applied, by press or by rubbing the back with a smooth tool, transferring the ink. The block can then be inked again, and a single block produces hundreds or thousands of impressions before wear becomes visible.

The method shapes the image in ways visible in every print:

• •Bold lines, since very fine lines are fragile and break under the pressure
• •Flat areas of solid colour rather than gradations, unless special techniques are used
• •Reversal, since the printed image is a mirror of the block
• •A separate block for each colour, requiring precise alignment between impressions
• •Visible character from the wood grain and from the cutting tool
• •A limit on size set by the available plank

The distinction between woodcut and wood engraving is technical and produces quite different results. A woodcut uses a plank cut along the grain, worked with knives and gouges, which is fast and gives bold expressive lines and is limited in fineness because the grain splits. A wood engraving uses the end grain of a hard wood, meaning a block cut across the trunk so the fibres run into the surface, which has no directional weakness and can be cut with fine engraving tools, allowing detail approaching that of metal engraving while remaining a relief block. That second method was developed in the late eighteenth century and made illustrated books and newspapers economically possible, since a relief block prints alongside type in the same press while an engraved metal plate does not.

Printing several colours means printing the same sheet several times and getting each impression in exactly the right place, which is the hardest part of the craft. The Japanese solution cuts a right-angled notch and a straight edge into each block at identical positions, so the paper is laid against the same two references every time, and that simple device is what made multi-colour printing on damp paper practical at speed. European presses use pins passing through holes in the paper. Any error shows immediately as a colour edge sitting beside its outline rather than inside it, and paper that stretches when damp and shrinks when dry complicates everything, which is why prints are worked on consistently damp paper. Deliberate misregistration became an expressive device in twentieth century printmaking, which only reads as deliberate because the norm is exactness.

The technique has independent histories in several places. Printing from blocks onto textiles and then onto paper is documented in China well over a thousand years ago and produced the earliest surviving printed books, with a scroll dated to 868 being the oldest bearing an explicit date. The Japanese tradition of multi-colour prints developed into an industry with a division of labour between the artist who drew the design, the cutter who prepared the blocks, the printer who took the impressions and the publisher who financed and sold the result, producing images that were cheap popular goods at the time and are now in every major museum. European woodcut served books, playing cards and devotional images from the fifteenth century. Modern printmakers use the same tools and materials with entirely different intentions.

Everything that will not print is cut away, ink touches only the raised surface, and the block yields hundreds of impressions. The method forces bold lines and flat colour and reverses the image, with a separate block per colour. Cutting the end grain of hard wood rather than a plank allows fine detail and made illustrated newspapers possible.