Burin (engraving) in the context of "Wood engravings"

Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing images on paper as prints or illustrations; these images are also called "engravings". Engraving is one of the oldest and most important techniques in printmaking. Wood engravings, a form of relief printing and stone engravings, such as petroglyphs, are not covered in this article.

Engraving was a historically important method of producing images on paper in artistic printmaking, in mapmaking, and also for commercial reproductions and illustrations for books and magazines. It has long been replaced by various photographic processes in its commercial applications and, partly because of the difficulty of learning the technique, is much less common in printmaking, where it has been largely replaced by etching and other techniques.

Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate (or "matrix") with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond. In principle, the method is practically identical to engraving. The difference is in the use of tools, and that the raised ridge along the furrow is not scraped or filed away as in engraving. Traditionally the plate was copper, but now acetate, zinc, or plexiglas are also commonly used.

Like etching, drypoint is easier to master than engraving for an artist trained in drawing because the technique of using the needle is closer to using a pencil than the engraver's burin. The incision into the plate is also typically much more shallow, so requiring less effort and technical skill in the use of the engraver's burin, but meaning that fewer impressions (copies) of a print can be pulled before wear to the plate becomes apparent. Modern limited editions of drypoint prints (if not steelfaced) very often have fewer than thirty impressions.

Albrecht Dürer (/ˈdjʊərər/ DURE-ər, German: [ˈalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528), sometimes spelled in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.

Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his later prints, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books. The woodcuts series are stylistically more Gothic than the rest of his work, but revolutionised the potential of that medium, while his extraordinary handling of the burin expanded especially the tonal range of his engravings.

Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result of the relatively lower pressure used to print, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.

Thomas Bewick developed the wood engraving technique in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century. His work differed from earlier woodcuts in two key ways. First, rather than using woodcarving tools such as knives, Bewick used an engraver's burin (graver). With this, he could create thin delicate lines, often creating large dark areas in the composition. Second, wood engraving traditionally uses the wood's end grain—while the older technique used the softer side grain. The resulting increased hardness and durability facilitated more detailed images.

Adam and Eve is the title of two famous works in different media by Albrecht Dürer, a German artist of the Northern Renaissance: an engraving made in 1504, and a pair of oil-on-panel paintings completed in 1507. The 1504 engraving depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by several symbolic animals. The engraving transformed how Adam and Eve were popularly depicted in art.

The 1507 painting in the Museo del Prado offered Dürer another opportunity to depict the ideal human figure in a different medium. Painted in Nuremberg soon after his return from Venice, the panels were influenced by Italian art. Dürer's observations on his second trip to Italy provided him with new approaches to portraying the human form. Here, he depicts the figures at human scale—the first full-scale nude subjects in German painting.

Stipple engraving is a technique used to create tone in an intaglio print by distributing a pattern of dots of various sizes and densities across the image. The pattern is created on the printing plate either in engraving by gouging out the dots with a burin, or through an etching process. Stippling was used as an adjunct to conventional line engraving and etching for over two centuries, before being developed as a distinct technique in the mid-18th century.

The technique allows for subtle tonal variations and is especially suitable for reproducing chalk drawings.

Jean Duplessis-Bertaux (1747–1819) was a French painter, draughtsman and producer of etchings and burin engravings. He signed himself Duplessi-Bertaux., Jean Duplessi-Bertaux, Duplessis-Bertaux or JD Bertaux. Some of his prints are attributed to Duplessis Berthault – however, this probably refers to Duplessis and his engraver (Pierre-Gabriel) Berthault. Prints at that time always bore the names of both the draughtsman and the engraver but in these cases two names were probably mistranscribed as one by a past cataloguer.

He produced prints of Scènes de la Révolution (he had taken part in the French Revolution himself), the Cris de Paris (Street Cries of Paris) and the Campagnes de Napoléon (illustrating Bonaparte's Italian campaigns, after paintings by Carle Vernet). He also collaborated on some prints with Jean-Louis Delignon, who sometimes completed unfinished work by Duplessis-Bertraux, and also produced a number of pornographic prints (sometimes unsigned and only later re-attributed to him).