Nomadic Press Blog » Wood Engraving and Block Cutting

Slices of Trees

Kent — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:41:31 +0000

Sitting here, in the middle of winter, I am comforted by images of warm Summer retreats. Here is a wood engraving of a North Woods escape.

Executed in end grain maple, this image was cut from wood that the Hamilton Wood Type Museum had finished in preparation for the production of wood type.

Hamilton Wood Type products were a staple of custom letterpress printers for decades. Type cases, type cabinets, wood type. If you were printing then you were using Hamilton.

Hamilton also produced drafting tables for use in design studios, both architectural and graphic, as well as equipment for dentists and homemakers. My two children spent a good deal of time sleeping in a crib that was manufactured at Hamilton’s facilities in Two Rivers Wisconsin.

Little letterpress printers from the start, they now ride bikes in the Summer, hither and yon through the woods, as I sit with my engraving tools and incise lines into thin slices of trees. Life is good.

Playing with Blocks

Kent — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:37:14 +0000

Years ago (indeed decades ago) in 6th grade, somebody had our class work on some lino cuts. That project may have been the beginning of my love for letterpress (or relief) printing.

Block cuts are a fairly immediate creative outlet. Sure, you can spend hours and even days working on a block, but you can also sit down and gouge one out fairly quickly and, with the aid of a brayer and a wooden spoon, have yourself a fist-full of prints in no time.

For finer lines, and for a longer lasting block, one must move on to wood cuts or wood engraving.

Like lino cuts, wood cuts are created using a cutting tool that is a sort of gouge. If you imagine a spoon with the bowl ground off half way to the handle and then sharpened, then you have the rough idea of what a wood (or lino) cutting tool looks like. The tools one uses are usually smaller than a spoon, and some have a bowl who’s bottom is triangular.

These tools are used to scoop out pieces of wood or lino. Everything that you leave behind, at the original surface of the block, gets covered with ink and prints onto paper.

Wood engraving uses a tighter grained block of wood (and the cut is made into the end grain) and the tool is a sheared off rod that sort of peels or shaves off bits of wood.

The shelf in this photo shows an assortment of blocks at the Nomadic Press.

Letterpress Illustration

Kent — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:38:27 +0000

A wood engraved illustration consists of a series of incisions which have been made into a piece of end-grain wood. The finished block is then inked and a relief print is taken from it.

Because of its close, tight grain, boxwood has been the traditional choice of wood engravers. Today, though, maple is the wood used most often. This is largely because it is now more readily available than boxwood.

Over the years I have taken a good deal of pleasure from producing engravings for my self and for inclusion in commercial projects.

Here is a shot of some of my engraving tools.