Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. 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. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Leather-covered sandbag, wood blocks and tools (burins), used in wood engraving
The Tench, A History of British Fishes (1835), by William Yarrell
Garb and weapons of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois, August 1875, photo made into a wood engraving.
This is a large wood engraving on an 1883 cover of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Such images were composed of multiple component blocks, combined to form a single image, so as to divide the work among a number of engravers.
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed technique, rather than a photographic reproduction of a visual artwork which would be printed using an electronic machine ; however, there is some cross-over between traditional and digital printmaking, including risograph.
Katsushika Hokusai The Underwave off Kanagawa, 1829/1833, color woodcut, Rijksmuseum Collection
Rembrandt, Self-portrait, etching, c. 1630
Francisco Goya, There is No One To Help Them, Disasters of War series, aquatint c. 1810
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Portrait of Otto Müller, 1915