Relief printing

The non-recessed surface will leave ink on the paper, whereas the recessed areas will not.

The relief family of techniques includes woodcut, metalcut, wood engraving, relief etching, linocut, rubber stamp, foam printing, potato printing, and some types of collagraph.

Traditional text printing with movable type is also a relief technique.

This meant that woodcuts were much easier to use as book illustrations, as they could be printed together with the text.

The first relief-printed publication in the US, the multi-page newspaper Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published on September 25, 1690.

The basic concept of relief printing. A is the block or matrix; B is the paper; the thick black lines are the inked areas. (The thickness of the ink is greatly exaggerated for illustration.)