Living Prints® Woodcut On-line

Cutting begins

Cherry wood is a semi-hardwood. Cutting it requires a very sharp knife if you are working in fine details. I keep my knives sharp, which means I have to sharpen them often. Cutting in this old style, 17th-Century manner is slow. I spend an hour on a couple square inches of work. It is mesmerizing and I tend to think a lot while doing it, or I listen to tapes or my CD/ROM. It's hard for me sometimes to stop and sharpen the knife, but experience has taught me that to stop now and then and sharpen the knife is the best way.

I can clearly see the lines of my tracing, and I can cut the lines easily with very light pressure at first, then, using a stroking, repetitive motion, I cut deeper with a straight blade. In the picture below I am using a curved or cup-shaped knife (a gouge) for clearing space between the lines. If you do not already know this, the block I am working on is called the line block, which means only the lines (wooden ridges) are intended to print. Some of the intricate details are outlines, as in a coloring-book, and other lines are supposed to look like pine-tree needles and flower-parts.

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  The wood between the line-drawing is cleared with a tiny gouge. Larger areas of non-printing areas are cleared with larger gouges. This picture is not in sequence of real-life because (in this particular method) other knife-work preceded the clearing stage.

The still image above was taken from real life. An educational videotape in my library, "Japanese Woodcut Workshop" shows the knives and cutting motions demonstrated in real time.

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©1999 Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. ritchie@seanet.com