What Is a Woodcut? Cutting Away Everything That Should Stay White

A design is drawn or transferred onto a smooth plank, cut along the grain, and everything that should print white is cut away with knives and gouges, leaving the lines and areas that will carry ink standing in relief. Ink is rolled across the surface, which coats only the raised parts, and paper is pressed against it, either by hand with a rubbing tool or in a press. The relationship between what is cut and what prints is inverted, which takes practice, since the artist is working in negative and removing material rather than adding it. The process is also unforgiving, because wood removed cannot be replaced, so a mistake means patching the block or starting again. Multiple colours require a separate block for each, cut to register precisely with the others.

The wood determines much of how the results look:

• •Bold lines, since a thin raised line is fragile and breaks under the pressure of printing
• •Strong contrast, since the medium naturally produces solid black against solid white with no middle tones
• •Visible grain, which prints as texture and which some artists suppress and others exploit
• •A characteristic angular quality in curves, since a knife moves differently through wood than a pen through ink
• •Durability, since a block can produce thousands of impressions, which is what made mass printing possible
• •Compatibility with type, since both print in relief at the same height, so pictures and text could be printed together in one pass

This was the first technique for reproducing images in quantity in Europe and the consequences were substantial. Printed images preceded printed books, circulating as devotional pictures and playing cards from the early fifteenth century, and the ability to produce identical copies of a picture was genuinely new. When movable type arrived, woodcut was the only illustration method compatible with it, since both print in relief and can sit in the same forme, which meant illustrated books were possible from the beginning of printing. That compatibility gave the medium a century of dominance in book illustration before engraving, which prints from incised lines and requires a separate press run, displaced it for fine work. The technique also carried information, with anatomical, botanical and technical books depending on it, so the diffusion of knowledge in early modern Europe ran substantially through carved wood.

Woodcut sits within a family of printing methods distinguished by where the ink sits. Wood engraving uses the end grain of a hard wood rather than the plank, which allows much finer work and was the standard method for illustration in the nineteenth century, so the pictures in Victorian books and newspapers are mostly this rather than woodcut proper. Linocut substitutes linoleum, which has no grain and cuts easily in any direction, producing smoother curves and being far easier to learn. Intaglio methods including engraving and etching print from lines cut or bitten below the surface, holding ink in the grooves, and produce the fine detailed line associated with old master prints. Lithography prints from a flat surface using the mutual repulsion of grease and water. Screen printing pushes ink through a stencilled mesh. Each produces a recognisable mark, and identifying which method made a print is a basic skill in the study of them.

The technique is far older outside Europe and reached a different destination in East Asia. Printing from wood blocks is documented in China centuries earlier, initially for text and Buddhist images, and the methods spread through the region. Japanese printmaking developed the approach into a system of extraordinary refinement, with multiple blocks producing many colours in precise register, specialist division of labour between designer, carver, printer and publisher, and techniques for gradation and for embossing that the European tradition never attempted. The results reached Europe in the nineteenth century and had a substantial effect on painters there, who found in them an approach to flatness, composition and colour that their own tradition lacked. Twentieth-century artists returned to the medium deliberately for its directness and its physical quality, treating the roughness the material imposes as expressive rather than as a limitation to be overcome.

Everything that will print white is cut away, so the artist works in negative and removes rather than adds, and a mistake cannot be undone. The material enforces bold lines and strong contrast because thin raised lines break. Relief printing at the same height as type is why illustrated books were possible from the start of European printing, and Japanese practice took the same technique to multi-block colour.