Art Journal: Making Stamps

As part of the Jane LaFazio class that I talked about in the last post – we were to create some homemade stamps based on our own designs.  I have always wanted to do this so I was excited to try!

 

The theme of the week was “Veggies” so I went to the grocery store and settled on some nice looking asparagus.

I tried several different designs around the heads of the asparagus.

I finally settled on this one:

From there I had to translate the design into a version that could be carved onto a stamp.  That’s this one:

So I took this design traced it, used a soft pencil to redraw the lines on the other side of the paper and then transferred it to the stamp material.  Jane had us use Speedball Speedy-Cut Carving Blocks.  You cut this stuff using linoleum carving tools and it cuts like butter!  In fact you have to be really careful to not over carve it.  It is a little crumbly and although it worked very well for this design I’m not sure it would work well for very detailed carvings.

Here’s what the carved stamp looks like.  I have included the package of Speedy-Cut for reference.  It turns out that Speedy-Cut will stick to those pieces of plexiglass that you use with commercial stamps (happy accident!) making it really easy to use the stamp.

I decided to use liquid acrylic paint as my “ink”.  This was a bit tricky because the paint has to be concentrated enough to make the impression but not so thick that it won’t spread well.  I had to fool around with this quite a bit to work out the right consistency.

Here is a pretty good impression made with my new stamp! I love the sort of rustic homemade look – very cool!

I played with my new stamp and tried several strengths of “ink” and different colors.  I ended up filling several pages and and I turned one of them into a fun art journal page!

Next post I will show how I incorporated my new stamp into a piece of artwork.