Woodcut facts for kids

Albrecht Dürer's woodcut, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497-1498).

A woodcut is a way of printing. An image is cut into a block of wood. The printing part remains level with the surface. The non-printing parts are removed, often with a tool called a gouge. The areas that are 'white' are cut away with a knife or chisel. Therefore the wood still at the original surface level are black in the final print. The wood block is cut in the direction of the grain of the wood. In Europe beechwood was most commonly used. In Japan, a special type of cherry wood was used.

The surface is covered with ink. It is rolled over the surface with an ink-covered roller (called a brayer). This leaves ink upon the flat surface, but none in the non-printing areas. Sometimes woodcuts are referred to by a formal word, xylography.

Gallery of Asian woodcuts

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  Coloured woodcut Buddha, 10th century, China.

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  Jiaozi (currency), 10th century, Sichuan, China.

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  Dragon, Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut, c. 1750-1900.

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  Modern woodcut Carp Painting, Dong Ho Painting, Vietnam.

Images for kids

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  The Four Horsemen c. 1496–98 by Albrecht Dürer, depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

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  Block Cutter at Work woodcut by Jost Amman, 1568

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  Madonna del Fuoco (Madonna of the Fire, c. 1425), Cathedral of Forlì, in Italy

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  Using a handheld gouge to cut a "white-line" woodcut design into Japanese plywood. The design has been sketched in chalk on a painted face of the plywood.

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  Bijin (beautiful woman) ukiyo-e by Keisai Eisen, before 1848

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  Children's book illustration by Randolph Caldecott; engraving and printing by Edmund Evans, 1887

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  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Portrait of Otto Müller (1915)

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  José Guadalupe Posada, Calavera Oaxaqueña, 1910

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  The Prophet, woodcut by Emil Nolde, 1912, various collections

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  The Crab that played with the sea, Woodcut by Rudyard Kipling illustrating one of his Just So Stories (1902). In mixed white-line (below) and normal woodcut (above).

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  A less sophisticated woodcut book illustration of the Hortus Sanitatis lapidary, Venice, Bernardino Benaglio e Giovanni de Cereto (1511)

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  Odawara-juku in the 1830s by Hiroshige, from his series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō

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  Chiaroscuro woodcut depicting Playing cupids by anonymous 16th-century Italian artist

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  Actor Ichikawa Ebizō IV as Takemura Sadanoshin, Japanese woodcut by Sharaku, 1794.

See also

In Spanish: Xilografía para niños