It is a Relief print process which means that parts of the plate (Or wood or plastic sheet) are cut away.
This makes it very similar to intaglio, but in relief print it is the parts that are left behind that make the print rather than the grooves which have been created by cutting away material.
Here is an example of a wood block that has been carved ready to print with.
This style of wood block printing originated in East Asia a very long time ago and is still a commonplace printing method in China and Japan. The earliest examples of wood block printing date back as far as 220 AD. The traditional style is often printed on to fabrics and considering the manual printing can be incredibly detailed. Flexography is almost exactly like the description above except the plate is a flexible polymer material so that it can wrapped around a roller and used in the same way as other rotary printing processes.
Flexographic printing can produce a greater range of inks than lithographic printing and is good at printing on a variety of different materials like plastics, papers and foil most specifically in packaging. These are some of the products that flexographic printing can produce:
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