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What is wood engraving? Woodcut, engraving and etching

Wood engraving is a way of printing pictures from the end grain of a hard block. How it differs from woodcut, metal engraving and etching, in plain terms.

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Wood engraving is a way of making prints. The artist cuts a picture into the end grain of a block of very hard wood, rolls ink over the surface, and presses paper against it. Tate’s definition: “A printmaking method distinct from woodcut in that the line is incised into the woodblock, rather than the background being cut away to leave a line in relief”. It is not the same thing as burning a design onto a board with a laser, which is what the phrase often means today. If that is what you came for, see laser engraving on wood.

The older meaning is worth knowing, because four terms are often confused: woodcut, wood engraving, engraving and etching. They differ in the material, in how the mark is made, and above all in which part of the surface carries the ink.

The four at a glance

SurfaceHow the image is madeWhat prints
WoodcutA wood block “cut along the grain”The background is carved away so the image stands upThe raised surface
Wood engravingThe end grain of a hard block, usually boxwoodLines are incised into the surfaceThe surface that is left; the cut lines stay white
EngravingA metal plateLines are cut by hand with a burinThe cut lines, which hold the ink
EtchingA metal plate, “traditionally copper but now usually zinc”Lines are drawn through an acid-resistant coating and bitten by acidThe bitten lines, which hold the ink

The quoted phrases and the facts in the table are from Tate’s glossary of art terms, except the white lines, which are described in a Smithsonian paper by Jacob Kainen, quoted below.

Relief and intaglio

The table has two families in it.

Relief printing inks the top of the block. Whatever is left standing prints, and whatever is cut away does not. Woodcut, wood engraving and linocut are all relief methods. Tate describes the woodcut process: “The block is carved so that an image stands out in relief. The relief image is then inked and paper placed against its surface before being run through a press.”

Intaglio printing is the reverse. Tate: “Intaglio describes any printmaking technique in which the image is produced by incising into the printing plate”. The incised line holds the ink and makes the image. Ink is worked into the cuts, the flat surface is wiped clean, and the plate is pressed hard against the paper to pull the ink out of the lines. Engraving and etching are intaglio methods.

So a cut line means opposite things in the two families. In an engraving on metal, the cut lines hold the ink and print. In a wood engraving the ink sits on the surface around them. Jacob Kainen, then curator of graphic arts at the Smithsonian, put it this way: “In the finished print the unworked surface printed black while each of the engraved lines showed as white.”

Wood engraving

Tate’s description is short and exact: “Wood engraving is a relief form of printmaking. It is usually done on the end grain of a block of boxwood, which is very hard, and so extremely fine detail is possible.”

Two things set it apart from woodcut.

  • The grain. A woodcut uses the plank side of the wood, cut along the grain. A wood engraving uses the end grain, which in boxwood is hard enough to hold very fine lines. Kainen notes that the plank side “would tear slightly” when a burin was moved across the grain.
  • The thinking. A woodcutter lowers the wood around a drawing, which prints as “black lines on white paper”. A wood engraver works the other way, in Kainen’s words “from black to white: the more lines taken away, the lighter the tones would appear”. The engraver’s skill was to render tones “in terms of white lines of varying thickness and spacing”.

For a time it was the common way to print pictures. Tate notes that it “became widely used in the nineteenth century as a method of reproducing pictures in books, newspapers and journals before the invention of photo-mechanical methods of reproduction”. Tate adds that artists occasionally used it for original work as well, and names Edward Calvert.

Thomas Bewick

A name closely tied to the craft is Thomas Bewick, whom the Bewick Society calls “the acclaimed wood engraver, artist and naturalist”. Its account of his life gives the outline. He was born in 1753 at Cherryburn in Northumberland, and at fourteen was apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, who had an engraving business in Newcastle upon Tyne. With Beilby he produced A General History of Quadrupeds, published in 1790. A History of British Birds followed, with Land Birds in 1797 and Water Birds in 1804, and The Fables of Aesop and Others in 1818. He died in 1828.

The same account shows how loosely the words are used: it speaks of his talent for “woodcut engraving” and calls his Chillingham Bull his “most celebrated woodcut”, though it introduces him as a wood engraver. Kainen notes that early writers used the two terms interchangeably.

Woodcut

Tate dates woodblock printing in Europe “from the twelfth century, at first for printing textiles”, with pictures printed on paper “by the late fourteenth century”. It can be done without a press: Tate points to Japanese ukiyo-e prints, made by placing the inked block against the paper and applying pressure by hand.

Linocut is the same idea in a softer material. Tate describes lino as easier to cut than wood, and in any direction, “as it has no grain”.

Engraving

In printmaking, engraving without the word “wood” means metal. Tate: “Engraving is a printmaking technique that involves making incisions into a metal plate which retain the ink and form the printed image.” The tool is the burin, “like a very fine chisel with a lozenge-shaped tip”. The angle and pressure of the cut decide how much ink a line holds, and so how wide and dark it prints.

Engraving on metal began as decoration. Tate says the technique “dates from classical antiquity as a method of decorating objects”, and that engraved plates began to be used for prints “about 1430 in Germany”. That first meaning, cutting a design into an object to decorate it, is the one laser engraving inherits.

Etching against engraving

Both are intaglio prints from metal plates. The difference is in what makes the line.

  • In an engraving, the artist’s hand pushes a burin through the metal.
  • In an etching, acid does the cutting. Tate’s account: the plate is coated with an acid-resistant ground, lines are drawn through the ground to expose the metal, and the plate is put in acid, where “the exposed metal is ‘bitten’, producing incised lines”. Stronger acid and longer exposure give deeper lines.

Etching is the younger method for prints: Tate says it “was probably not used for printmaking much before the early sixteenth century”.

In everyday speech the two words are now used loosely for any mark cut or burned into a surface, which is why laser makers write of “etching” and “engraving” glass as the same job.

From engraved lines to machines

An engraver has one ink and no greys. Tone has to come from the lines: as Tate says of the burin, the way a line is cut gives “variations in width and darkness when printed”. Anyone turning a photograph into something a pen plotter or a laser can draw faces the same problem.

Plotcaster’s Engrave style borrows the look of copperplate engraving: lines that follow the form of the subject, swell in the shadows and cross in the darkest areas. Its dithering styles make tone from dots instead. Neither is wood engraving in the printmaker’s sense.

Questions

Is a wood engraving a print or a carved piece of wood? In art, it is the print on paper. The block is the tool that makes it.

Why boxwood? Tate gives the reason: it “is very hard, and so extremely fine detail is possible”.

Is a woodcut a kind of engraving? Not strictly. A woodcut is a relief print from a plank, and engraving is an intaglio print from metal. People have long used the words loosely, as the writing on Bewick shows.

Can a laser make a printing block? A laser can cut away the surface of wood to leave a raised image, which is the principle of a relief block. That is a different subject from this guide; laser engraving on wood covers how a laser marks wood.

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