Wood engraving is a
printmaking and
letterpress printing technique, in which the artist works the image or
matrix of images into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of
woodcut, it uses
relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary
engraving, like
etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the
intaglio method, where the ink fills the
valleys, the removed areas. As a result, wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than copper-plate engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.