Woodcut

The block is inked evenly with a dauber or a roller, keeping the ink out of the recesses, and paper is pressed against it. That can be done in a press or by hand, by rubbing the back of the sheet with a spoon or a similar tool. The printed image is the reverse of the design on the block.^1,2

There is no separate original that the print copies. As the Victoria and Albert Museum puts it, with a print the original work of art is the print itself, not the block or plate.³

Color takes more than one printing. In Japanese woodblock printing each color had its own carved block, sometimes as many as twenty. The first block cut from the artist’s design is the key-block. Prints taken from it were used to make a block for each color, and registration marks let the printer line the colors up on the sheet.^4,5

The reduction method uses a single block for all the colors. The whole run is printed in one color, more of the block is cut away, and the next color is printed over the first. Picasso turned to the method for his linocuts after trouble aligning separate blocks.⁶

Because each stage of the block is cut away to make the next, the finished image cannot be printed again from that block. A museum exhibition text puts it plainly: the blocks are destroyed in the process, and the edition is whatever number of acceptable prints is left after the last color.^6,7

The Print Council of America’s 1961 definition of an original print asked two things: that the artist alone made the image on the block, plate or stone, and that the impression was printed from it by the artist or at the artist’s direction. The council’s founders were reacting in part to photomechanical offset reproductions of paintings and drawings.⁸

That is the line between the two kinds of print on this site. Sabra Field opened her studio to publish hand-pulled woodblock prints. The classic editions of Bev Doolittle are offset lithographs of her watercolor paintings, and her publisher describes offset lithography as a photomechanical or digital printing technique.^9,10,11,12

Not every print by a woodcut artist is a woodcut. Field later issued many of her images as IRIS and archival pigment prints, which are ink-jet prints made from her woodcuts, and the two can be hard to tell apart under glass.^13,14

An edition can be limited by the process itself, because the printing surface wears out, or by a decision of the artist or publisher. Tate says the second is the more common.^15,3

Printing by hand does not by itself make an edition small: Japanese commercial woodblocks were sometimes printed in the thousands, until the blocks wore. But a smaller edition makes a print rarer, and Sotheby’s says that often increases its value.^4,16

The table shows what prints by the eleven artists on this site sold for on eBay in our latest snapshot. Many things lie behind the differences, and the kind of print is one of them. What is my print worth? goes through the rest.