Woodcut

Woodcut is a relief printmaking technique in which an artist carves away the areas of a wood block that are not meant to print, leaving the design standing in relief on the block's surface; ink is then rolled across the raised surface and the block is pressed onto paper, transferring only the raised, inked design. It is the oldest of the major printmaking techniques, developed in China by at least the ninth century for printing text and images and independently adopted in Europe by the fourteenth century, where it became the primary technique for illustrated books and single-sheet religious images before the introduction of engraving. Woodcut reached a technical and artistic peak in Albrecht Durer's German Renaissance prints and, through an entirely separate lineage, in the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition, where multiple blocks were carved and printed in precise registration to build up full-color prints such as those of Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige.