Woodcut

Two mental inversions, and both catch people out.

1. Draw your design, then trace it and flip it — the block must carry a mirror image.
2. Shade everything that will print BLACK.
3. Recognise that a printed line is a ridge you leave standing, with a cut on each side.

A woodcut uses a plank cut along the grain, and the grain fights you.

1. Outline every shape first with a fine V-tool, cutting just outside your drawn line.
2. Clear the open areas with a wider gouge.
3. Always cut AWAY from your body and keep the free hand behind the blade.

A roller charges the raised areas and must not reach the floor of the cuts.

1. Roll ink out thinly on a flat slab until it hisses slightly.
2. Charge a soft roller and roll across the block in several directions.
3. Inspect at a low angle — the cut areas must stay clean.

Hand pressure, worked evenly, then judge and re-cut.

1. Lay paper on the inked block and hold it still.
2. Burnish the back with a baren in small circles, working over the whole area.
3. Peel a corner to check before lifting; pull the proof and study it.

Woodblock printing on textiles is ancient, and printing on paper is established in China by the Tang dynasty — the Diamond Sutra of 868 is a dated, printed, illustrated book. Europe takes it up in the early fifteenth century for playing cards and devotional images, before Gutenberg.

The technical reason woodcut dominated book illustration is relief height. Type is relief; a woodcut is relief; both can be locked into the same forme and printed together in one pull. Copper engraving is intaglio, needs a completely different press and a separate pass, and therefore appears as separate plates bound in — more expensive, and usually reserved for prestige books.

Wood engraving is a different craft with a confusingly similar name. Thomas Bewick perfected it in the late eighteenth century by working on the END grain of boxwood with an engraver's burin rather than the plank grain with a knife. End grain has no direction to tear, so it takes extremely fine lines and holds up for enormous print runs — which made the illustrated newspapers and magazines of the nineteenth century possible.

Japanese ukiyo-e took the medium furthest as colour printing, with a separate block for each colour and registration marks — the kentō — cut into every block so the sheets align. Hokusai's wave is a woodcut, printed from several blocks in careful register, and it is worth knowing that the carver and the printer were usually different people from the artist.