Wood engraving

Common card · No. 418939

Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. The areas of the design that show ink when printed are those left uncut on the surface of the wood block. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result of the relatively lower pressure used to print, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and may have a distinctive white-on-black character. Thomas Bewick developed the wood engraving technique in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century. His work differed from earlier woodcuts in two key ways. First, rather than using woodcarving tools such as knives, Bewick used an engraver's burin (graver). With...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Thomas Bewick, Public domain