Cutting the block is very physical and obviously there is a huge amount of wood chips created from a block this big!

These prints take a lot of work and planning and sometimes I don’t get things right the first time, which is easy to forget when I’m only posting the finished pieces and not every step of the process. As I was cutting the 18 x 24 inch woodblock, I realized I should have included a prey animal to allude to the hunting tradition. So, I decided that I would add a little rabbit as part of the screen printed colors.

3 of the 5 screen printed colors complete – the 6th color comes from the woodblock.

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“For me, wood engraving’s intimate scale and slow pace provide a welcome respite from our cyber-fast world. The tactile nature and physicality of the relief printmaking process is satisfying. The strokes of my tools reveal the light, with the image slowly emerging from a darkened surface. It is charmingly mysterious and feeds my need for quiet concentration and hands-on creative productivity.” – Joanne Price

Wood Engraving (also known as Xylography) was developed in the late 18th century by Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), an artist and naturalist in Northern England. Bewick made his living doing commercial graphic design work, much like modern day designers do – making ads, business cards and logos combining image and text. Bewick engraved both cooper and wood, but excelled in the latter. From the 1830s – early 1900s, wood engravings dominated illustration in newspapers, magazines, and in books with demand for increased edition sizes. The demands of the Industrial Revolution created a medium that could be as detailed as copper engraving, able to withstand thousands of impressions and could be printed at the same time as the text. This reduced the printing time, labor, and cost of illustrating text.

Once photographic techniques gained a broader foothold in workshops, the creative engraver in commercial realms declined, but the relief medium as an art form truly blossomed in the early 1900s.

Come discover this medium, steeped in its history, utilized in a computer age, with me!

I’ll show you how I cut my original drawings into endgrain wood. I will demonstrate how I ink and print my wood blocks. I’ll also talk about the history, the tools and materials, as well as contemporary resources and examples. 

Price is nationally known for her wood engravings and is president of the Wood Engravers Network, an organization that fosters education and creates a resource for wood engravers. She has led wood engraving workshops throughout the country, has exhibited widely and teaches printmaking at the University of Kentucky.

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Graver to graver, magnifiers poised; the game is on. During this lively demonstration we had an unprecedented face off between metal and wood engraving with James Ehlers (metal), the only tenured professor in the U.S. to hold the title of “Firearms Engraving Guild of American Master Engraver,” and Joanne Price (wood), President of the Wood Engravers’ Network, an elected member of the Society of Wood Engravers, and owner of Starpointe Studio. John Hancock, visual and performance artist, and professor at University of Mary Hardin-Baylor of Texas, moderated the face off. As we discussed the pros and cons of each technique, the moderator engaged the audience with props and performance to demonstrate close-up views of each process in action. Which technique came out on the top?

We talked about each process’ historic roots, tools, materials, and more – you can see the digital slide show on my tablet, an original print by Thomas Bewick from the late 1800s, information about the Wood Engravers’ Network (WEN) along with some of WEN’s exhibition catalogs (Right), helpful handouts, some tools and different material examples. Contact me if you would like to have pdf versions of the handouts. I even did some hand-printed take-aways as shown in the video below, although, not nearly enough! Special thanks to Becky Blosser for the great photo of me during the sharpening portion of the demo. Thanks also to GRS, McClain’s Printmaking Supplies, Conrad Machine Co., Takach Press, Savoir-Faire, and Renaissance Graphics – vendor donations and support were greatly appreciated!

Photo by Becky Blosser

A ridiculously sized cardboard prop of a burin – did I fool you into thinking it was half real?

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