By Melissa Black
If you don’t know what relief printing is, you are not the only one. When I signed up for the Intro to Printmaking class last spring, I had a vague idea that it involved carving stuff into wood and somehow creating art. Honestly, I still didn’t quite understand what it was until the third day of class. Now the quarter is almost over, and not only can I proudly assert that I understand the basics of relief printing, but I can also try and explain how fabulous it is to you. Actually, I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.
Relief printing has been around for quite some time—the famous Japanese prints were in fact woodcut prints, and countless other works of art throughout history were created using this timeless technique. However, contrary to some beliefs, relief printing is not a dying art. One of the main advantages to relief printing is that you can create multiple works of art that use the same image, but are all original because they have each been individually created by the artist.
