Wood engraving
By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas.
The combination of this new wood engraving method and mechanized printing drove a rapid expansion of illustrations in the 19th century.
On the other hand, A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (1839), by William Andrew Chatto,[4] is almost all about woodcut and its much longer history, with Thomas Bewick only appearing from page 558.
The beginnings of modern wood engraving techniques developed in the late 17th century, by which time publishers of quality books only used the relief printing of wood blocks for small images in the text such as initials, taking advantage of relief printing blocks to be fitted into the same forme or set-up page as the letterpress type of the text.
[7] At the end of the 18th century, the English artist and author Thomas Bewick is "usually considered the founder of wood-engraving" as "the first to realize its full potentialities" for larger illustrations.
[2] Finding a woodcutting knife not suitable for working against the grain in harder woods, Bewick used a burin (or graver), an engraving tool with a V-shaped cutting tip.
[2] As Thomas Balston explains, Bewick abandoned the attempts of previous wood-engravers 'to imitate the black lines of copper engravings.
An artist "meticulously traced the photograph upon the surface of a block of boxwood or other suitable tree, then used a sharp tool to cut out the troughs (the white part of the photo) from the wood.
[12] Besides interpreting details of light and shade, from the 1820s onwards, engravers used the method to reproduce freehand line drawings.
This was, in many ways an unnatural application, since engravers had to cut away almost all the surface of the block to produce the printable lines of the artist's drawing.
At about the same time, French engravers developed a modified technique (partly a return to that of Bewick) in which cross-hatching (one set of parallel lines crossing another at an angle) was almost eliminated.
Instead, all tonal gradations were rendered by white lines of varying thickness and closeness, sometimes broken into dots for the darkest areas.
With this change, wood engraving was left free to develop as a creative form in its own right, a movement prefigured in the late 1800s by such artists as Joseph Crawhall II and the Beggarstaff Brothers.
Some modern wood engravers use substitutes made of PVC or resin, mounted on MDF, which produce similarly detailed results of a slightly different character.
However, a handful of wood engravers also work in colour, using three or four blocks of primary colours—in a way parallel to the four-colour process in modern printing.
