Fig. 2.
In fact, the cut illustrates the three fundamentals of wood engraving; the white line made by cutting out the wood so that no impression will be obtained when printed; the white space which is similarly obtained; and the black space, which is made by leaving the wood untouched. It was, however, necessary to employ the black line, otherwise the tape with which the two men—the artist and his father—are measuring the trunk of the tree would be invisible where it crosses the sky. In a word, the little picture illustrates very nicely the legitimate use of wood in the graphic arts.
As already remarked, the majority of the earlier wood cuts and engravings are reproductions of line drawings, so that although we may admire and often marvel at the technical ability of the engraver, the credit for what artistic merit such illustrations may possess must, in the majority of cases, go to the draughtsman.
The work of the earlier wood engravers may be conveniently studied in A Lyttel Booke of Nonsense, by R. D., London, 1912. (See also the relevant works cited under Literature, p. 94).
Bewick, of course, is an outstanding example of an artist who used wood engraving for illustrating natural history; the methods he pursued may be studied in the tailpiece on p. 11, which was printed from an electrotype of the original block.
Wood engraving, up to quite recent times, was the method of reproducing text figures; not only for scientific books and periodicals, but also for general literature and journals.
Much of this work is of outstanding excellence; for scientific work the following may be studied:
Duchartre: Eléments de Botanique. Paris, 1867. The drawings were made by Riocreux and engraved by Leblanc.
Baillon: Histoire des Plantes, Paris, 1887. This work contains some beautiful wood engravings, reproductions of drawings by Faguet.
Bentham: Handbook of the British Flora, London, 1865. The engravings are from drawings by W. H. Fitch.
Deschanel: Natural Philosophy, London, 1890. The engravings, many of which are of excellent quality, are by Laplante, Rapine and others. In many cases, notably in the representation of the rays of light passing through lenses and also in the illustrations of snow crystals, the use of the white line is admirably demonstrated.
Kerner: Pflanzenleben, Leipzig, 1888. This contains some excellent engravings by Winkler and others.
Le Maout et Decaisne; Traité général de Botanique, Paris, 1876. This work contains splendid examples by Riocreux and Steinheil (see Fig. 8).
Oliver: First Book of Indian Botany, London, 1869. This contains some characteristic work of W. H. Fitch.
It does not appear to be generally known that excellent reproductions in colour may be obtained from wood blocks by superposed printing in a manner comparable to that followed in chromolithography although, of course, in the present instance, the blocks are in relief (Fig. 1).
From the foregoing account it is obvious that the engraving even of a small illustration, except it be in mere outline, involves a considerable amount of labour; in fact, if the subject were large it was usual to cut it up into areas and distribute between several engravers, the finished blocks finally being joined together to make the block of the whole picture. Hence it is not surprising to find that when the photo-mechanical processes were perfected, the older methods of reproduction were ousted by the newer, more especially since they are much less expensive; these, therefore, may next be considered.
THE HALF TONE PROCESS.—For the making of a relief block by photo-mechanical means, the main difficulty is the proper rendition of the tones intermediate between black and white; this has been solved, at any rate in part, by the discovery of the half-tone process.
If an ordinary photographic negative be highly magnified, it will be seen that the high lights, the low lights, and the intermediate tones are made by the varying density of the reduced silver. In the lighter parts the small black particles are surrounded by colourless areas, whilst in the dark regions small colourless patches are surrounded by black areas owing to the closeness of the particles of silver (Plate 5, Fig. 2).
What is required, therefore, is a relief block which will print a number of dots of equal density but of unequal size. Vervasser illustrates the point in an ingenious way: a plate, covered with a number of cones, is supposed to be acted upon by light in such a way that the cones are truncated in varying degrees according to intensity of the light falling upon them. The section of such a plate would therefore shew a curve (Fig. 3); now if the truncated cones be brought down to one level and a print taken from them, the high lights would be represented by black dots surrounded by white areas and so on.
