Instructables: Creating, cutting and printing your own woodblock

I'm particularly fond of this medium. If only I had the patience.

From Instructables, R Banks takes us through the 5 steps of "woodblocking":

As background, it's worth knowing that there are basically two ways of doing relief printing with bits of wood, woodcut and woodblock. Woodcut is a process that cuts ALONG the grain of a piece of wood, and the grain itself often becomes part of the print, showing itself through as a texture. Woodblock, which is what I'm going to focus on, uses really tightly grained wood that is cut across the grain (the same way you would cut through a trunk to fell a tree if you were a lumberjack). Because of the way it's cut it's a little easier to carve. The direction you cut doesn't matter since you're looking at the end of the grain so it doesn't have a fixed direction, and your cutting tool isn't always being pushed around by the grain. But good wood with tight grain can cost a little. We'll get into equipment and tools now...

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Comments

[Sophie Brown]

I've never done woodblock but I have gone to the art supply store and got some tiles there and just carved it out to make my own "rubber stamps". It was a lot to go through but I still have all of them and it was fun and I'd recommend it.

[Evan]

A cheap alternative are dollar store rubber erasers.