A woodcut is a print made from a carved block of wood. The artist gouges away the parts of the surface meant to stay blank and leaves the rest standing in relief.
Ink rolled over the block clings only to those raised parts. When paper is pressed against it, they print as black lines and shapes, and the carved hollows leave the paper white.
Printmakers call this method relief printing. A rubber stamp works the same way: the letters stand up from the rubber, and only they touch the page. The woodcut began in China, and Europe was making its own by 1400.
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Carving shapes the look of the print. Fine shading is hard to leave standing in wood, so a woodcut favors firm outlines and flat areas of black and white.
From a plank to a printed sheet
Everything starts with a plank, sawn along the length of the trunk, so that the fibers of the tree, its grain, run in long lines along the face. The tools are a knife and gouges, small curved chisels that scoop wood out.
For most of the history of the woodcut, though, the hand holding those tools was not the hand of the artist whose name is printed under the picture.
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