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Surface & texture · Hand & machine marks

Carved line

Woodcut, linocut or engraving marks.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under surface & texture: what is the material finish?

styles make it: 67
as a defining choice: 23
as a usual one: 21
now and then: 23
avoid it: 8

Styles defined by it 23

For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.

Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)c. 960–present · East AsiaThe page and letter of the East Asian book.
Nianhua & Chinese Folk Printc. 1100–present · East AsiaWoodblock pictures bought each New Year and pasted on doors, walls and kitchen shrines to invite luck and ward off harm: paired door gods, plump babies with carp, the Kitchen God, opera scenes and auspicious rebuses.
Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)c. 1410–present · East Asia, South AsiaTibetan Buddhist and Bön woodblock printing, from the first printed Kangyur (1410, cut in China) and the 15th-century presses of Gungthang to the great printing houses of Narthang, Derge and Lhasa.
Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram)1531–1724 · Southern Europe, Central Europe, Western EuropeA European book genre in which, from Chrestien Wechel's Paris edition of 1534 on, every page or opening repeats one fixed unit: a short motto, an allegorical picture and an explanatory verse, which only together yield a moral, amorous or religious meaning.
Đông Hồ & Hàng Trống Folk Prints1600–present · Southeast AsiaVietnam's two classic folk-print schools, bought for Tết. Đông Hồ families press each colour from its own carved block onto giấy điệp, dó paper brushed with ground scallop shell whose streaked, faintly sparkling surface serves as the white, and print the black line last.
Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards1639–present · Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central EuropeThe standard pattern of French tarot cards, descended from Milanese tarot and recut by card-makers in Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Dijon and Marseille from the 17th century.
Lubok Popular Print1650–1920 · Eastern EuropeCheap single-sheet Russian popular prints sold at fairs and by pedlars from the later 17th century: woodcut, later engraved and lithographed pictures of saints, fables, heroes, battles and satire in which text and image share one sheet.
Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints1670–1900 · East AsiaMass-produced Edo-period woodblock prints of actors, courtesans, legends and landscapes, designed by an artist, cut and printed by specialist craftsmen and sold cheaply by commercial publishers.
Arts & Crafts Movement1860–1920 · Western Europe, North AmericaA British-led reform movement that answered industrial shoddiness with honest handcraft, medieval models and the ideal of joy in labour.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)1880–1917 · Latin America & CaribbeanCheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics1905–1925 · Central Europe, Western EuropeThe graphic arm of German Expressionism, from Die Brücke in Dresden (1905) to the Berlin journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion and Frans Masereel's woodcut novels.
Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics1921–1927 · Latin America & CaribbeanMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
Mavo1923–1925 · East AsiaTokyo's anarchist avant-garde, founded in July 1923 by Murayama Tomoyoshi, back from a year in Berlin, with four former Futurists, and its magazine MAVO (seven issues, July 1924 to August 1925).
Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement1931–1949 · East AsiaThe leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution.
Taller de Gráfica Popular1937–1977 · Latin America & CaribbeanA Mexico City printmaking collective founded in 1937 around Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins and Luis Arenal to put art at the service of popular and anti-fascist struggles.
Literatura de Cordel Woodcut1940–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe cover art of Brazil's literatura de cordel, pocket chapbooks of verse whose single picture is a small woodcut cut in soft umburana wood and printed in black above a plain letterpress title.
Rorke's Drift Linocut1962–1982 · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe prints of the Lutheran art centre that Swedish teachers Peder and Ulla Gowenius started at Ceza Hospital in 1962 and moved to Rorke's Drift in 1963: under apartheid, which denied Black South Africans formal fine-art education, the chief training ground for many Black artists.
Gráfica del 68 (Mexican Student Movement Graphics)1968 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe graphics of the 1968 Mexican student movement, made in days by brigades in the print workshops of San Carlos and La Esmeralda and in improvised school workshops.
Global Village Coffeehouse1988–2003 · North AmericaThe faux-naive, earth-toned illustration style that late-1980s American designers set against Memphis, and that chain cafés, bookstores, packaging and clip art spread through the 1990s.
Torres Strait Islander Linocut1991–present · OceaniaRelief prints by Torres Strait Islander artists of Zenadth Kes, which grew from an Indigenous visual art course at Cairns College of TAFE by 1991 and the Mualgau Minaral collective on Mua (Moa) Island.
Indonesian Woodcut Activism (Taring Padi)1998–present · Southeast AsiaThe protest graphics of Taring Padi, the collective founded by students and activists in Yogyakarta in 1998 as Suharto fell, and of the punk and activist woodcut scenes around it.
Oaxacan Protest Printmaking & Street Graphics (ASARO)2006–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe street graphics of Oaxaca City since the 2006 teachers' strike and APPO uprising, when ASARO, the stencil collective Lapiztola and later workshops such as Colectivo Subterráneos made the colonial centre's walls a newspaper.
Extinction Rebellion Graphics2018–present · Western Europe, Global / networkedThe visual identity of Extinction Rebellion, the climate movement founded in Stroud in 2018, built by its volunteer Art Group as a free kit anyone may print.

Styles that often use it 21

A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.

Styles that use it now and then 23

An occasional choice in these styles.

It often goes with

Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.

Woodblock & linocutin 47 of 67
Line illustrationin 58 of 67
Paper & letterpress bitein 46 of 67
Spiritual & sacredin 40 of 67
Framed panelsin 51 of 67
Monochromein 48 of 67

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in surface & texture