Woodblock printing is a technique for printing images and text widely used throughout East Asia. This technique originated in China in ancient times as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper.
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing is an image or design that is made according to a wooden block. This woodblock is also known as a woodblock. Since the fifteenth century AD, artists have produced woodcuts, which are among the beautiful touches in the printing industry.
Artists make most of their woodcuts from pine blocks. Artists cut and remove parts of the surface using regular and concave chisels and knives. The woodcut parts appear white in the final print. As for the remaining uncut parts, the artist covers them with ink and places a white paper on the template, then presses the paper with any blunt tool. This rubbing results in the transfer of the inked image to the paper. In order to produce color images, the artist usually uses colored ink and a number of separate blocks by assigning a block to each color. Each of these templates has a part of the image. The artist must make sure that the image is consistent in all the templates so that it appears in a correct integration in the final print.
15th century Europe
Woodcuts were first used in Europe, in the Middle Ages, to print patterns on textiles. With the beginning of the fifteenth century AD, artists formed wooden signs to draw distinct religious subjects, to decorate books and provide them with pictures, and to make playing cards. At the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century, the German artist Albrecht Dürer created wooden drawings that opened new horizons of expression and artistic skill. And to get acquainted with models of wood signs in their infancy. See: the book patch; Rummy; Switzerland.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Japanese artists created many outstanding woodcuts. Their prints greatly influenced European artists, including Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh. The Europeans admired the Japanese products because of their boldness, flat shapes, fine coloring, smooth lines, and fine composition. See: Japanese publications; the play; hokusai; Shraku.
In the twentieth century, expressionist artists created many wood carvings. These include German artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Norwegian Edvard Munch.
Handmade wood block printing
The use of the method of decorating fabrics with manual embossed templates is the first beginning of the printing process, and it is summarized in transferring motifs, units, or designs to the surfaces of fabrics so that they take specific positions through pastes to transfer color in the designated places so that it remains confined to the required positions and does not extend to others, and it is one of the continuous methods Development.
Preparation of motifs and units (design)
The surface of the linoleum template is covered with a layer of white paint or a diluted color to make it easy to convey the decorations to be executed clearly. The drawing to be taken out is shown on transparent paper with a pencil (B4), and we do not forget to mark the outer borders of the repetition until it is transferred in a correct position over the template. Then the translucent (i.e., transparent on the template in an inverted position) is reflected over the wax template, and the borders of the typographic repetition are transferred with a dry pen, so we see the borders of the design backwards on the template from the original drawing (not reversing the transfer of the design on the template, because the printed design is the opposite of what is required to be taken out) and it can be overlooked Reverse the design in the case of one-color designs, but when the design has more than one color, we need to implement more than one template
After transferring the motifs and design units on the surface of the linoleum as lines defining the areas of the motifs, the design is colored over the template with a black color and the places that are excavated and removed are left with the color of the used linoleum in order to avoid mistakes in digging places that we do not want to be excavated (and these errors cannot be corrected after excavation). Preparation of motifs and units (design)
Seals and stamps
Seals and stamps were used for printing before the invention of woodblock printing. The oldest of these seals came from Mesopotamia and Egypt. The use of round cylinder seals to carve motifs on pottery slabs dates back to the Mesopotamian civilization before 3000 B.C. These are the most common surviving artworks to date, featuring intricate and beautiful shapes. There are a few brick stamps (eg 13 x 13 cm) to form marks on pottery that remain from about 2270 BC. There are also inscriptions on Roman lead pipes, and plate MS 5236 may be a unique gold foil leaf stamped with an inscription in the 6th century BC. But these plates did not use the ink that was necessary for printing, but only etched figures into relatively soft materials. The use of small stamps for seals in both China and Egypt preceded the use of large stamps. Printing of cloth in Europe and India preceded printing of paper or papyrus, and this may also have been the case in China. Presentation prints in Europe were often printed on silk until the 17th century.
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The origins of woodblock printing in Asia
The earliest surviving woodblock prints from China are silk and tricolor flowers from the Han Dynasty (before AD 220). Woodblock printing evidently developed in Asia several centuries earlier than in Europe. The Chinese were the first to use this process to print texts, and also later in Europe, photo printing evolved from canvas to paper (woodcuts). It is now also established that the use of the same process in Europe for printing large text with images came about 400 years after the invention of transfer printing by Bai Xing (990–1051) during the Northern Song dynasty in China.
An alternative to woodblock printing was found in China, a Han Dynasty copying system that used carved stone panels to print pages of text. The three necessary ingredients for woodblock printing are the blocks of wood into which the design is etched, the pigment that was widely used in the ancient world, and pieces of cloth or paper first produced in China in the third or second century BC. Woodblock printing on papyrus appears not to have been produced, although it was possible.
Some specimens of woodblock printing dating back to the tenth century have been recovered from Egypt. It was mostly used to write prayers and amulets. This technology could have spread from China or was an independent invention, but it had very little spread and virtually disappeared at the end of the fourteenth century. This technique was used mainly in India for textile printing, as it had been a major industry since at least the tenth century. Large quantities of Indian printed silk and cotton have been exported to Europe throughout modern history.
Since the Chinese language has thousands of characters, woodblock printing is more suitable than transfer printing. Although the Chinese invented a type of pottery transfer printing in the 11th century and metal transfer printing was invented in Korea in the 13th century, woodblock printing continued to be favored due to the enormous challenges of typesetting Chinese text of 40,000 characters or more. Also, the goal of printing in the East may have been to standardize a liturgical text (such as the Buddhist canonical text Tripitaka, which required 80,000 woodblocks to print), and they were able to preserve agreed woodcuts for centuries. When a text needs to be reproduced the original block can simply be copied over again, while transfer printing involves a high probability of error with each reprint.