Woodcut or Scraperboard

Woodcut or Scraperboard.

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(Note: The drawing above has been greatly enhanced to show the layers.)

I have already introduced you to Frederick Walker and his woodcut art, of which he was quite a prolific producer. I have another local artist who used something similar in technique, except that the material became the fashion between the two world wars.

I have four explanations and descriptions these techniques and I hope that you will be able to form your own conclusions.

Relief Printing:

The oldest form of printing. The parts that stand up in relief are the parts that carry the ink and make the marks on the paper. Letter presses work by having movable lead type with the letters in relief. Woodcut, wood engravings & scraperboard can be combined with movable type so that illustrations can be mixed with text and printed together.
Scraperboard, Wood engraving, Woodcut.

Scraperboard:

A method of relief printing. Lines are cut through a surface of card into the chalk filling of the board. In appearance it looks much like wood engraving, only sometimes it has greater areas of black with less white lines. Scraperboard illustrations are often called woodcuts.

Wood Engraved:

A form of relief printing. Lines are cut into the end grain of the wood. This method produces clearer more even lines than woodcuts. There are two main forms of wood engraving/ woodcutting, the black line and the white line. The older is the black line in which the illustration is made to stand up from the block by cutting away until only the lines of the illustration are left. In the white line method, pioneered by Thomas Bewick, the lines are the unprinted part of the illustration, with the areas between being the black printed part.

Woodcut:

Often used as a term to cover true woodcuts, wood engravings & scraperboard illustrations. It is a form of relief printing and so woodcut illustrations can be set in the same plate as type and printed along with the text. Strictly a woodcut is cut along the side of wood, giving a difference between those strokes that cut along the grain and those that cut across the grain. It was the first form of illustration to be used for books.