Making Great Wood EngravingsWood engravings have a magnificent history. They developed along with printing and were the only illustrative means at hand for the early printers. They are used in early Bibles and schoolbooks. Essentially, wood engraving is an art of line-rendering. In fact, during the first years of the woodcut, they were used largely to reproduce other works and thus were largely a facsimile art. It was not until the 19th century that the technique of producing tones in the woodcut was discovered, and the line of such great engravers as Diirer and Holbein lost its importance to the newer art of shading. Cross-hatching, of course, had been widely used, particularly by Diirer's teacher, Michael Wohlgemuth. You know the old story about making rabbit stew . . . First you catch the rabbit. To make a woodcut, you start with a piece of wood. The wood, usually cut from the tree to run with the grain, is planed smooth. The artist takes his cutting tool and removes all the sections of the envisioned print that he does not want to show on the final work. Thus, when he has finished with his wood block, he has a carved relief which stands out from the regular surface of the section of plank. (The same principle can be observed in a typewriter key. Notice that the letter which will strike an impression through your ribbon stands out in relief from the flat bed of the striking portion or head of the key.) If the desired design is anything more than a most rudimentary one, the artist usually draws it on the surface of the wood before he goes to work with his knife or gouge. (The great difference in technique between cutting for the relief process rather than the intaglio is that, since the line to be printed will be raised, both sides must be removed separately. In the etching, the line takes in the ink, so a single cutting into the metal is sufficient.) Any kind of knife is used, depending on the preference of the artist and the requisite fineness of the desired result.
The earliest wood engravings or woodcuts were printed by rubbing, and this practice is sometimes followed even today. The artist has but to ink the surface of his wood block, place a piece of paper on the block, and rub the paper with a special tool for the purpose. However, the use of the press is far more prevalent and there is nothing much to explain if you know the simplest mechanics of printing. When using a press, the block is given its coating of ink, the paper is put on the block, and the pressman, or artist, whizzes it through his press. The finished design is thus transferred to paper. While I have used the terms woodcuts and wood engravings as interchangeable, there are minor technical differences which a purist might not forgive me for overlooking. In the woodcut, the artist usually works against the grain of the wood. In wood engravings he takes a block of wood that has been sawn from the cross section of a tree and uses a special engraver's tool, termed a burin. Personally, I would not draw so fine a line between the two methods. The basic work method is the essential element. |