Wood engraving
Wood engraving is, simply, the art of engraving, using the medium of wood. This was the earliest type of engraving.
The original method — which is more precisely termed wood cutting, since it used a knife rather than engraving tools — was developed c. 1400. The outlines of the design to be engraved were put down on a side of smooth-grained wood, and, usually with a knife, the excess surface of the wood block (all but the lines) would be cut away, a process called blocking. This left a set of raised wooden lines on the face of the block. In order make a print of this engraving, thick ink would be applied to the raised design. This is known as a relief. Finally, a sheet of paper (or other material) would be pressed firmly against the wood in order to assure that all the lines printed. This method led directly to the development of the printing press and the 1453 introduction of a press using movable type by Johann Gutenberg.
The art of wood engraving, however, reached its pinnacle roughly 350 years later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the works of Thomas Bewick. Bewick generally made his engraving in harder woods than normally used, and would engrave the end of a block instead of the side. Finding a knife not apt to working against the grain for harder woods, Bewick used a copper engraving tool called a burin, which has a V-shaped gauge. Engraving on wood in this manner produced highly detailed images, virtually indistinguishable from engraving on copper plates, which were far more expensive. Furthermore, unlike copper-plate engravings that quickly deteriorated, thousands of copies could be struck from engraved wood blocks. Since wood engraving is a relief process while metal engraving is an intaglio technique, wood engravings could be used on conventional print presses, which were themselves making rapid mechanical improvements during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result of Bewick's innovation and improvements in the printing press, illustrations of art, nature, technical processes, famous people, foreign lands and many other subjects became for the first time widely available.
Wood engraving was almost entirely superseded by the development of photoengraving, which is the method of making printing plates via photographic means. More recent wood engravers, including Rudolph Ruzicka, generally use Bewick's method. Wood engraving is still common as student or folk art.