What Is the Method for Making a Woodcut?

The Woodcut Process

• The design, intended for transfer to fabric or paper, is first drawn on the top surface of a block of wood. A cutting tool called a burin is then used to cut away or eliminate all of the wood, except for the lines to be printed. When movable type and the printing press appeared in the mid-fifteenth century, woodcuts produced in this way were inked and placed in a press to produce printed pages, complete with accompanying illustrations.

Quality Development

• Early woodcuts featured thick outlines to avoid the danger of the design cracking or breaking when pressure was applied to the surface of the wood. These simple images were hand-colored to enhance their appearance. German artist Albrecht Durer, working in the late fifteenth century, produced intricate woodcuts with lines that offered texture, tone and dimension to the finished prints. In the early sixteenth century, Titian, a famous painter from Venice, used intricately crafted woodcut designs to share his drawings with the world.

Changing Times

• By the mid- sixteenth century, books were produced using two types of presses. One press would print the type and another the illustrations which were formed, not with woodcuts, but through the newer process of engraving. Pictures were no longer set on the same page as the written text but rather on separate pages. Woodcuts were used less in commercial printing as engraving produced a finer and more detailed finished print for all manner of paper products.

Woodcuts Today

• Woodcuts continue to be produced as an art form today by two predominant methods. In the Japanese style, water-based ink is applied to the woodcut with a brush. The image is then transferred to dampened paper by a hand-applied pad called a baren. The European method uses oil-based or specially-formulated, water-based inks rolled onto the surface of the image and subsequently machine-pressed or transferred by hand onto paper.