Neither boldness, fineness of design nor size alone will reveal to us whether a particular relief print is a woodcut or an engraving as I have observed woodcuts as fine as any engraving and wood engravings that could just as easily been done as woodcuts. Broadly speaking, the woodcut will possess more areas of solid black, with the design appearing as black against a white background, while the engraving will be made up of a multitude of white lines and specks with a minimum of black masses, thus appearing as white lines against a black background, which is often called white line engraving.
Woodcut - 11 1/2"x15" | 
Wood Engraving - 4"x4 3/4" |
Whether a print looks like a woodcut or an engraving is of no real concern, since the fact of the matter is; If the print is done on the plank and cut with knives or gouges, it is a woodcut. If it is executed on the end-grain and cut with gravers, it is a wood engraving.
Traditionally, we refer to these printed images themselves as being either a Woodcut, or a Wood Engraving; however, many contemporary artist's also use synthetic materials to achieve desired results by using; Linoleum, Acrylic, Lucite, Lexan and a host of resin based products, as well as an increasing assortment of power tools as aids. The proper names for these types of relief prints should be: Linoleum Cut, Acrylic Engraving, Lucite Engraving, Resingrave, and so on, to differentiate them from the more traditional woodcut and wood engraving rather than the generic term Relief Print that some artists use to obscure from us the true nature of the material used .
A properly executed and printed woodcut edition may be as large as several hundred, while the wood engraving may yield an almost unlimited number of impressions, sometimes running into many thousands. Therein lie's one of xylography's unique attributes for artist's and publishers; the creation of multiple works of art from a single creative effort.
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