A print can go wrong in three classic ways, and the maddening thing is you usually don't see the damage until you peel the paper off. Knowing the three traps in advance is most of the battle.
Trap One: It Comes Out Mirror-reversed
When you press paper onto the block, the image flips left-to-right. Whatever you carved on the right prints on the left. Most of the time you don't even notice — a tree's a tree either way. But the moment there's text, a signature, or a deliberately lopsided composition, the reversal bites. Carve a "B" and you print a backwards one. Put your bold tree on the right of the block and it lands on the left of the print.
The fix is simple once you know: carve everything as a mirror image. If you want text or a strong asymmetry, draw it the right way round first, then flip it (a mirror, or trace it through from the back) before you carve. Print it as the reverse of what you want, and it comes out correct.
Trap Two: Too Much Ink Smudges and Fills the Lines
Ink is greedy. Roll on too much and it does two ugly things: it smudges out past your shapes, and it fills in your fine carved lines — those delicate gaps you cut for branches or grass clog up and print as a solid smear. The crisp graphic look that made you choose printmaking in the first place just vanishes into a muddy blob. The opposite — too little ink — fails the other way: the print comes out patchy, pale and broken, like a photocopier running dry. There's a narrow happy zone in the middle: an even, thin film you can hear as a faint hiss off the roller. Enough to coat, not enough to drown.
Trap Three: the Layers Don't Line Up
The instant you print more than one colour, you meet registration — getting each layer to land in exactly the right spot. Print the green hills, then the blue sky a few millimetres off, and you get an ugly white gap on one side and an overlap on the other. The landscape looks like a badly tuned telly. The fix is a registration jig: a fixed frame or a set of pencil marks that puts the paper and the block in the same position for every single layer. It's not glamorous, but it's the difference between a sharp three-colour print and a blurry one. Register carefully and the layers stack like they were meant to.