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Originally blocks were prepared by cutting away the wood to leave only the lines from which the illustration was to be printed. This was the BLACK LINE method. It produced illustration that had a lot of white space where the wood had been cut away, with the lines of the drawing in black. To make the blocks using this method required that the wood be removed from both sides of each of the lines of the illustrations so that those lines stood out in relief. In woodcutting this was straightforward, however, in wood-engraving this entailed engraving a line on each side of the line to be printed and then removing the wood up to those engraved lines.
The WHITE LINE method, perfected by Thomas Bewick, produces a much stronger, more durable blocks. The lines of the illustration are engraved into the block. The printing area is the planes between the lines. This produces illustrations that tend to have greater areas of black. It also only requires one cut to be made for each line, not one on each side of a line as in the black line method.
The white line method is the one that is also used for other media such as lino and scraper-board.